Annual Salary + Token: The New Compensation Logic Executives Must Understand

During a recent speech, Jensen Huang shared a concept that has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley:

"In the future, every engineer in a company will have an annual Token budget. While their base salary might be hundreds of thousands of dollars, I will provide an additional Token allocation equivalent to half their salary to amplify their output tenfold. How much Token allocation comes with a job offer has already become a trending recruitment topic in the Valley."

Many are puzzled: Isn't a Token just a unit for AI billing? Why include it in a compensation structure?

In the past, paying a salary was essentially buying an employee's professional execution. Writing code quickly or designing beautiful proposals were the skills that held value. Today, however, Tokens are the "electricity" and "fuel" of the AI era. Whether you want AI to write code, process data, or generate proposals for your employees, it requires Token consumption. AI agents handle these execution-level tasks faster, more accurately, and at a lower cost than humans. When an agent can complete a day's worth of coding in ten minutes, the traditional logic of paying "per head" or "per hour" collapses.