At GTC 2026, Jensen Huang 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 Systèmes, Red Hat, Cisco, and Amdocs.
Seventeen enterprise software companies, touching virtually every industry and every Fortune 500 corporation, all agreeing to build their next generation of AI products on a shared foundation that Nvidia designed, Nvidia optimizes, and Nvidia maintains.
“The enterprise software industry will evolve into specialized agentic platforms,” Huang told the crowd. “And the IT industry is on the brink of its next great expansion.”
**Inside Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit**
Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit collapses the complexity of building enterprise AI agents 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, network, and privacy guardrails
• **cuOpt**: An optimization skill library
Each component is open source. Each is optimized for Nvidia hardware. The combination means that as AI agents proliferate across the corporate world, they will generate demand for Nvidia GPUs not because companies choose to buy them, but because the software they depend on was engineered to require them.
**AI-Q: Cutting Query Costs by More Than 50%**
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 Nemotron’s open models, which Nvidia says can cut query costs by more than 50% while maintaining top-tier accuracy.
**OpenShell: The Security Architecture Enterprise Needs**
OpenShell tackles what has been the single biggest obstacle in boardroom conversations 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 existing security tools.
**Who Signed On and What They’re Building**
**Adobe** will adopt Agent Toolkit software as the foundation for running hybrid, long-running creativity, productivity, and marketing agents. **Salesforce** is working with Agent Toolkit including Nemotron models, enabling customers to build AI agents using Agentforce for service, sales, and marketing, with Slack as the primary conversational interface. **SAP** is using open Agent Toolkit for enabling AI agents through Joule Studio on SAP Business Technology Platform.
**From Chip Design to Clinical Trials**
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 leverages Agent Toolkit with its ChipStack AI SuperAgent. Siemens is launching Fuse EDA AI Agent. Synopsys is building a multi-agent framework using Nemotron.
In healthcare, **IQVIA** is integrating Nemotron and other Agent Toolkit software with IQVIA.ai. The scale is already significant: IQVIA has deployed more than 150 agents across internal teams and client environments, including 19 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies.
**CrowdStrike** unveiled a Secure-by-Design AI Blueprint that embeds its Falcon platform protection directly into Nvidia AI agent architectures.
**The Open-Source Gambit**
OpenShell is open source. Nemotron models are open. AI-Q blueprints are publicly available. LangChain, whose open-source frameworks have been downloaded over 1 billion times, is working with Nvidia to integrate Agent Toolkit components.
But openness in AI has a way of being strategically selective. The models are open, but they are optimized for Nvidia’s CUDA libraries. The runtime is open, but it integrates most deeply with Nvidia’s security partners. The blueprints are open, but they perform best on Nvidia hardware.
The strategy 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**
Nvidia also announced the Nemotron Coalition—a global collaboration of model builders including Mistral AI, Cursor, LangChain, Perplexity, Reflection AI, Sarvam, and Thinking Machines Lab. The coalition’s first project will be a base model co-developed by Mistral AI and Nvidia, trained on Nvidia DGX Cloud, that will underpin the upcoming Nemotron 4 family.
Whether enterprise buyers will embrace Nvidia’s agent-centric vision remains to be seen. But with seventeen of the world’s most important enterprise software companies signed on, and the world’s most valuable chip company directly invested in the platform’s success, Nvidia has made its position in the AI agent economy clear.