Events hosted by technology companies certainly aren’t anything out of the ordinary, as most vendors use conferences to provide customers with technical training and a roadmap of products. However, there are a handful of vendor events that have become so influential that they gain the status of an industry event. RSA in security, Cisco Live for networking and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s re:Invent with cloud are all examples of this.

Nvidia Corp.’s GPU Technology Conference, running virtually April 12-16, has now reached this status with respect to artificial intelligence. Although there are a handful of others, GTC is by far the biggest and broadest AI event. Just a few years ago, it was a smaller event for developers and the odd gamer, but it now includes tracks on data center, networking, graphics, autonomous vehicles and all things AI — not to mention the keynote by Chief Executive Jensen Huang (pictured), which has been focused increasingly on AI in recent years.

This year’s GTC is particularly important because we are at an AI tipping point. A decade ago, AI was still a vision and the stuff of science fiction, but a perfect storm has been forming where faster graphics processing units, the silicon pioneered by Nvidia that powers AI, are being combined with more mature software and massive amounts of data to train the AI algorithms. Any business leaders who believe AI isn’t here yet are mistaken. Some examples:

• Medical facilities are using AI to diagnose MRIs, finding life-threatening conditions much faster than people alone.
• Vehicles are being outfitted with autopilot and other driver assistance features, making the roads safer.
• Consumer products are being accessed with voice interfaces making the technology usable by so many more people.
• Collaboration software is now powered by AI, making remote meetings arguably better than in-person meetings and enabling us to work smarter and more efficiently in a world where professionals are often working remotely.
• Cybersecurity tools use AI to find malicious threats faster. Given what recently transpired with SolarWinds, this should be a call to action for chief information security officers.

These are just a few examples, but AI is on the verge of exploding and becoming infused into everything from call centers to productivity applications to videos and even songwriting: The GTC theme song was written by an AI)

Over the next decade, the information technology industry will see a significant shift in jobs and skills. This is akin to the industry transition that happened when the computer industry moved from mainframes to Wintel personal computers, just on a much bigger scale. I was in the early days of my career and the shift to PCs from mainframes democratized computing. Sure, it killed off a number of jobs in the areas of mainframe administration, but millions of other jobs were created on the back end of that transition as the PC became nearly ubiquitous in businesses.

Although I’m using the term AI, Nvidia GTC is actually an accelerated computing conference, but AI is the major use case for it currently. As the industry transitions from CPU-based traditional computing to GPU-powered computing, the skills required for IT will change as many of the day-to-day tasks will become partially and fully automated.

Network managers won’t need to constantly update network policies. Server administrators won’t need to worry about provisioning and reprovisioning resources. Security operations center engineers will no longer be required to look through pages and pages of security information and event management data to find threats. AI powered by accelerated computing will do most of the heavy lifting, enabling technology pros to focus on other areas.

As this happens, the number of new jobs will likely dwarf the ones that are eliminated, but it’s critical to begin transitioning skills now. There will be new jobs in data analytics, data sciences, AI architecture, ethics for AI and business analysis, to name just a few.

GTC is the single event where every aspect of AI is represented – from building the infrastructure to working with data to understanding how to apply the final product. One final note: GTC isn’t just for the those well-schooled in accelerated computing and AI. The event has a great “101” track to help people that are just getting started.

GTC is not only a place to enhance skills but also gain a lot of new ones as well. I’m certainly looking forward to it and urge anyone in IT looking how to keep their skills current to attend.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Nvidia/livestream