At GTC 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the Agent Toolkit—an open-source platform for building autonomous AI agents—with a partner list that reads like a whos who of enterprise software: 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 Fortune 500 corporation, all agreeing to build their next generation of AI products on a shared foundation that Nvidia designed, optimizes, and maintains.
The Enterprise Software Industrys Next Evolution
“The enterprise software industry will evolve into specialized agentic platforms,” Huang told the GTC crowd. “The IT industry is on the brink of its next great expansion.”
What he left unsaid: Nvidia has positioned itself as the tollbooth at the entrance to that expansion—open to all, owned by one.
Inside Nvidias Agent Toolkit
The toolkit includes:
- Nemotron: Open models optimized for agentic reasoning
- AI-Q: Blueprint letting agents perceive, reason, and act on enterprise knowledge
- OpenShell: Runtime enforcing policy-based security and privacy guardrails
- cuOpt: Optimization skill library
Cutting Costs by 50%
AI-Q routes complex tasks to frontier models while delegating research to Nemotron, cutting query costs by more than 50 percent while maintaining accuracy. Nvidia claims its AI-Q Blueprint achieved top ranking on both DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Bench II.
What Industry Leaders Are Building
Adobe adopts Agent Toolkit for creativity and marketing agents. Salesforce enables customers to deploy Agentforce agents using Slack as the orchestration layer. SAP uses it through Joule Studio. IQVIA has deployed over 150 agents across 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies.
The Open-Source Gambit
Nvidias open-source approach is a carefully constructed competitive moat. Models are open but optimized for CUDA. The strategy mirrors Googles Android: give away the OS to generate demand for core services. Nvidia gives away the agent OS to generate demand for GPUs.
Beyond Agents: Vera Rubin
Nvidia unveiled the Vera Rubin platform—seven new chips including the Vera CPU for agentic AI. The Vera Rubin NVL72 rack delivers up to 10x higher inference throughput per watt at one-tenth the cost per token vs Blackwell. Uber plans Nvidia-powered robotaxis across 28 cities by 2028.
Nvidia believes the era of AI agents will be larger than the era of AI models—and intends to own the platform layer.