I get the feeling that Nvidia's impact, because they're not really a consumer company, is kind of under-the-radar a bit. Of course most of us know that they build the chips that power AI in the cloud, but they're doing a lot of very interesting stuff that moves them out of the data centre.

Jensen Huang, their CEO, is getting known for his snappy dress sense, but he's also pretty good at explaining Nvidia's increasingly all-encompassing vision. At yesterday's CES keynote he introduced a number of very interesting things, but the one that grabbed my attention was the discussion about AI Agents and his vision of a "digital employee pipeline". I know, a slightly weird naming. He's talking about a pool of AI Agents able to perform human-like roles and be managed more like a pool of employees than as a set of software.

Jensen: "In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the AI HR department of AI agents in the future. Today, they manage and maintain a bunch of software from the IT industry. In the future, they'll maintain, nurture, onboard and improve a whole bunch of digital agents and provision them to the company to use. Your IT department is going to become kind of like 'AI Agent HR'."

Now, it's easy to react to this story with a "yeah, some day" response. It feels like hype, right? Certainly my reaction and experience of today's AI Agent technology is that we're a long way from being ready to think of this technology replacing human roles.

But let's hold our cynical thoughts. Nvidia showcased four examples:

1. An AI Agent for generating podcasts and video training. We know this is real - it's Google's NotebookLM and it works incredibly well.
2. An AI Agent for software development. I know that's real because I use this every single day.
3. An AI Agent to assist in drug research. We know this is real because there's a variety of such products on the market.
4. An AI Agent for video analysis. We know this is real, because it's how many video and TV companies tag and analyse vast quantities of video.

However, none of these "agents" have the human characteristics that Nvidia show in their keynote and especially no human-like avatars. None of them are autonomous, none of them can operate without a human. They are advanced AI-powered tools, not some futuristic AI workforce that supplants humans.

Nevertheless, the vision presented was a useful longer-term perspective of where all this might end up. And, given progress, we might get there sooner than many of us expect.

My slight worry is that some people are going to hear this talk of an AI Agent workforce and think we're at the point where we can build a team of AI workers. We're not. This is a futuristic vision. Some day, but not today. Meanwhile, AI tools can do incredible things and improve productivity many times over. It's an exciting time and the opportunities are enormous. But we're not building AI's to replace humans, we're building AI tools to help humans.