Steve Dempsey

AI WAS SUPPOSED to replace many workers. But it’s struggling to replace one executive.

Artificial Intelligence has a trust problem. 52% of respondents to Stanford University’s Worldwide 2026 AI Index said AI makes them nervous. In America, 64% expect AI to destroy jobs, while just 5% believe it will create more opportunities for workers. And only 31% of Americans trust their government to regulate AI responsibly. That number in Ireland is 49%.

What we’ve got here is an industry promising to transform civilisation while much of civilisation regards that transformation with wariness, or maybe even dread.

Silicon Valley seems to think this is a communications problem, something that can be fixed with better marketing, another thought piece from a CEO, or by renaming data centres as information campuses.

But perhaps the problem isn’t the technology or the communications. Perhaps the issue is the calibre of the people running big the AI companies. 

This has been made pretty clear in recent days with the downfall of Jensen Huang.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, Huang is the co-founder of Nvidia, who transformed the company from a gaming-chip manufacturer into the engine of the AI revolution.

He resigned on Thursday following revelations of extramarital affairs, including one with a woman who may be a Chinese agent.

His departure has wiped billions from Nvidia’s market value and exposed a delicious irony: an industry that has spent the past three years promising to make human beings redundant is in a tizzy about replacing one individual.  

Huang’s genius

In fairness to Jensen Huang, he isn’t your bog-standard tech CEO. He looks different, sporting his trademark Tom Ford leather jacket. This $9,000 jacket became so synonymous with Nvidia that the company could have included it on its balance sheet as an intangible asset. Huang stood out at product launches, conferences and meetings with world leaders. He looked like the frontman of an over-the-hill rock band.

But he also showed real vision. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993, when the company was focused on producing graphics chips for computer games. Huang recognised that the parallel processing power required to render computer graphics could also transform scientific computing and, eventually, artificial intelligence.

Nvidia invested in CUDA, a software platform that allowed developers to harness its chips for applications beyond gaming. This was an expensive bet that required patience, conviction and a willingness to invest in a future that hadn’t yet arrived. And when the future did arrive, Nvidia was ready.

It had spent years building the infrastructure, software and relationships that made its technology indispensable for the AI revolution. It wasn’t luck. It was leadership.

Huang’s flaw

Huang made Nvidia irreplaceable to the AI ecosystem.

Ironically, he also made himself seem irreplaceable to his own company.

His management style was famously unconventional, with 60 direct reports. He was deeply involved in technical decisions, product strategy and customer relationships. This gave Nvidia speed and coherence, but it also made one individual increasingly vital.

Which is all fine and dandy until that individual has a relationship with employees and is successfully targeted by bad actors. And that’s exactly what happened.

Huang admitted to being unfaithful to his wife of 40 years, with reports identifying an alleged affair with an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, who US intelligence officials suspect of spying for China. Huang also had an alleged relationship with an Nvidia exec who reported to him.

He had to go.

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Alice Huang attends a dinner hosted by Jensen Huang in Taiwan in May 2025

Replacing a founder like Huang is no easy matter. Running a company involves more than processing information. It requires imagination, courage and the ability to persuade other people to commit themselves to a future that doesn’t yet exist.

No matter what the AI boosters say, this type of charisma and conviction remains a wholly human competence.

The whole sorry episode should make Silicon Valley reconsider its obsession with replacing human beings.

The industry’s greatest success stories weren’t created by algorithms optimising yesterday’s data.

They were built by people who imagined something different, persuaded others to believe in it and spent decades making it happen.

And in a week that’s been full of awful news about men abusing power dynamics, tech companies should remember that moral character matters.

Maybe not to shareholders, but to the people who they want to use their products and buy into their vision of the future. But the architects of AI need to remember that vision isn’t virtue.

If your promise is that you’re going to change the world, the world’s population will want to trust in your good character.

All too often, Silicon Valley CEOs have asked us to trust their software. But software is just code – we need to be able to trust the people who control and monetise the code.