Jensen Huang walked onto the GTC stage Monday wearing his trademark leather jacket and carrying, as it turned out, the blueprints for a new kind of industry dominance. The Nvidia CEO unveiled the Agent Toolkit, an open-source platform for building autonomous AI agents, and then rattled off the names of the companies that will use it: Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Siemens, CrowdStrike, Atlassian, Cadence, Synopsys, IQVIA, Palantir, Box, Cohesity, Dassault Systemes, Red Hat, Cisco, and Amdocs. Seventeen enterprise software companies, touching virtually every industry and every Fortune 500 corporation.
Building an enterprise AI agent today is an exercise in frustration. A company that wants to deploy an autonomous system must assemble a language model, a retrieval system, a security layer, an orchestration framework, and a runtime environment, typically from different vendors whose products were never designed to work together.
Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit collapses that complexity into a unified platform. It includes Nemotron, a family of open models optimized for agentic reasoning; AI-Q, an open blueprint that lets agents perceive, reason, and act on enterprise knowledge; OpenShell, an open-source runtime enforcing policy-based security; and cuOpt, an optimization skill library.
The AI-Q component addresses a pain point that has dogged enterprise AI adoption: cost. Its hybrid architecture routes complex orchestration tasks to frontier models while delegating research tasks to open Nemotron models, which Nvidia says can cut query costs by more than 50 percent while maintaining top-tier accuracy.
Adobe, in a simultaneously announced strategic partnership, will adopt Agent Toolkit software as the foundation for running hybrid, long-running creativity, productivity, and marketing agents. Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s chair and CEO, said the companies will bring together our Firefly models, CUDA libraries, 3D digital twins for marketing, and Agent Toolkit and Nemotron to our agentic frameworks.
Salesforce’s integration may be the one enterprise IT leaders parse most carefully. The company is working with Agent Toolkit software including Nemotron models, enabling customers to build, customize, and deploy AI agents using Agentforce for service, sales, and marketing. The collaboration introduces a reference architecture where employees can use Slack as the primary conversational interface for Agentforce agents.
SAP, whose software underpins the financial and operational plumbing of most Global 2000 companies, is using open Agent Toolkit software including NeMo for enabling AI agents through Joule Studio on SAP Business Technology Platform.
In semiconductor design, where a single advanced chip can cost billions of dollars and take half a decade to develop, three of the four major electronic design automation companies are building agents on Nvidia’s stack. Cadence will leverage Agent Toolkit and Nemotron with its ChipStack AI SuperAgent for semiconductor design and verification. Siemens is launching its Fuse EDA AI Agent, and Synopsys is building a multi-agent framework powered by its AgentEngineer technology.
OpenShell tackles what has been the single biggest obstacle in every boardroom conversation about letting AI agents loose inside corporate systems: trust. The runtime creates isolated sandboxes that enforce strict policies around data access, network reach, and privacy boundaries. Nvidia is collaborating with Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Microsoft Security, and TrendAI to integrate OpenShell with their existing security tools.
CrowdStrike unveiled a Secure-by-Design AI Blueprint that embeds its Falcon platform protection directly into Nvidia AI agent architectures, including agents built on AI-Q and OpenShell. These are not aftermarket bolt-ons; they are foundational integrations that signal the security industry views Nvidia’s agent platform as the substrate it needs to protect.
There is something almost paradoxical about a company with a multi-trillion-dollar market capitalization giving away its most strategically important software. But Nvidia’s open-source approach to Agent Toolkit is less an act of generosity than a carefully constructed competitive moat.
The models are open, but they are optimized for Nvidia’s CUDA libraries, the proprietary software layer that has locked developers into Nvidia GPUs for two decades. LangChain, whose open-source frameworks have been downloaded over 1 billion times, is working with Nvidia to integrate Agent Toolkit components into its deep agent library.
This has a historical analog in Google’s approach to Android: give away the operating system to ensure that the entire mobile ecosystem generates demand for your core services. Nvidia is giving away the agent operating system to ensure that the entire enterprise AI ecosystem generates demand for its core product, the GPU.
The Nemotron Coalition announced Monday, including Mistral AI, Cursor, LangChain, Perplexity, Reflection AI, Sarvam, and Thinking Machines Lab, will co-develop a base model trained on Nvidia DGX Cloud that will underpin the upcoming Nemotron 4 family.
Developers can explore Agent Toolkit and OpenShell on build.nvidia.com today, running on inference providers and Nvidia Cloud Partners including Baseten, CoreWeave, DeepInfra, DigitalOcean, and others, all of which run Nvidia GPUs.
Whether Nvidia has just won the enterprise AI infrastructure race or planted the seeds of its own displacement remains to be seen. But at GTC 2026, the company’s ambitions extended well beyond silicon.