If Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were a student again, he’d take advantage of generative AI to have a successful career.
“The first thing I would do is to learn AI,” Huang said in a January episode of the “Huge Conversations” show with Cleo Abram, mentioning tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok.
“Learning how to interact with AI is not unlike being someone who’s really good at asking questions,” he added. “Prompting AI is very similar. You can’t just randomly ask a bunch of questions. Asking AI to be an assistant to you requires some expertise and artistry of how to prompt it.”
Say you’re an entrepreneur and someone asks you: “Tell me about your business?” You’d likely be confused — business is so complex that a vague question like that is difficult to answer. But what if they asked, “Can you explain the first steps to launching an online retail business?” Now you can give a more pointed, helpful response.
The same goes for AI. To ask better questions, try to think of the chatbot as a child, Lazarus AI prompt director Kelly Daniel wrote for CNBC Make It in February.
“You’re talking to a smart kid. One who wants to make you happy and do what you’re asking,” Daniel wrote. “But the bottom line is, this kid doesn’t know everything you do about your task or business. They’re limited by their lack of context and previous experience, and it’s your job to provide that context.”
Organize your prompt clearly and concisely so the AI model can better generate a response, she added. Breaking your instructions down into a list or steps is easier to understand than a lengthy paragraph. And if you have examples of what you want, include that as well.
Using Daniel’s advice, a good prompt can look like this:
I need to give a keynote speech at my company’s annual conference. I want it to sound like Bill Gates during his early days at Microsoft. The speech needs to:
- Congratulate the team on a great first quarter.
- Acknowledge our improvements with our marketing and media strategy.
- Introduce our new productivity goals and motivate employees to meet them.
Huang’s insight comes as few young Americans use AI regularly right now — 11% of Americans ages 14 to 22 say they use generative AI once or twice per week, according to a 2024 report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Common Sense Media and Hopelab. Yet, 70% of the skills used in most jobs could change due to the technology by 2030, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 Work Change report.
Perfecting AI prompts — and asking better questions in general — is a skill that will remain relevant for years to come, so students should take the time to develop it, no matter what career field they see themselves in, Huang added.
“If I were a student today, irrespective of whether it’s for math or science or chemistry or biology — doesn’t matter what field of science I’m going into or what profession — I’m going to ask myself, ‘How can I use AI to do my job better?'” he said.
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