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The Agentic Era Has a New Toolmaker, and It's Not Who You Think

  • By John K. Waters
  • 03/19/2026

Key Takeaways

  • NVIDIA introduced Agent Toolkit, an open-source package for building and running enterprise AI agents, including a new runtime called OpenShell that the company says adds policy-based security, network, and privacy guardrails.
  • The company said its AI-Q Blueprint, built with LangChain, uses a hybrid mix of frontier models and Nvidia’s Nemotron open models, which Nvidia says can reduce query costs by more than 50% while maintaining strong accuracy.
  • NVIDIA said a broad group of software and enterprise partners, including Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, Siemens, and ServiceNow, are using or testing the toolkit as they build AI agents for business workflows.

NVIDIA wants to be more than the company selling the picks and shovels of the AI boom. On Tuesday, at its GTC 2026 conference, the chip giant rolled out a new open-source software package designed to help companies build, deploy, and manage AI agents.

The release is aimed squarely at developers and enterprises racing to turn generative AI into something more operational: agents that can sift through internal data, reason through multi-step problems, and act across workplace applications. To do that, NVIDIA is offering a bundle of models, prebuilt agent blueprints, and a new open-source runtime called OpenShell.

OpenShell is meant to solve one of the biggest sticking points in enterprise AI: trust. NVIDIA says the runtime adds policy-based guardrails around security, networking, and privacy, giving companies a safer framework for putting more autonomous systems into production.

Taken together, the launch underscores NVIDIA’s broader ambition to shape the next layer of enterprise software. As businesses test how AI can reshape knowledge work, the company is positioning itself not just as the maker of the hardware underneath the revolution, but as a key supplier of the tools that could make office automation actually work.

“Claude Code and OpenClaw have sparked the agent inflection point, extending AI beyond generation and reasoning into action,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, in a statement. "Employees will be supercharged by teams of frontier, specialized, and custom-built agents they deploy and manage. The enterprise software industry will evolve into specialized agentic platforms, and the IT industry is on the brink of its next great expansion.”

Among the new pieces is NVIDIA's AI-Q Blueprint, built with LangChain, designed to enable developers to create agents that can search enterprise knowledge, select relevant data sources, and explain how answers were produced. NVIDIA said the system uses a hybrid architecture, relying on frontier models for orchestration and its own Nemotron open models for research, a setup it said can cut query costs by more than 50% while maintaining high accuracy.

NVIDIA also said it used AI-Q to build the top-ranking agent on the DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Bench II leaderboards.

The company said OpenShell is being developed to work with security tools from Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Microsoft Security, and TrendAI. LangChain is also working with NVIDIA to integrate parts of the toolkit, including AI-Q, OpenShell, and Nemotron models, into its deep agent library, the companies said.

NVIDIA said a broad group of software companies is working with the toolkit, including Adobe, Atlassian, Amdocs, Box, Cadence, Cisco, Cohesity, CrowdStrike, Dassault Systèmes, IQVIA, Red Hat, SAP, Salesforce, Siemens, ServiceNow, and Synopsys. The company described those efforts as spanning uses from creative and productivity software to customer support, semiconductor design, and enterprise workflow automation.

Some partners have outlined specific plans. Adobe, for example, plans to use the toolkit for long-running creativity, productivity, and marketing agents. Salesforce is working with NVIDIA software, including Nemotron models, to let customers build and deploy agents through Agentforce, with Slack serving as a conversational interface and orchestration layer. Siemens is launching a Fuse EDA AI Agent using Nemotron for workflows in electronic design automation.

Developers can access Agent Toolkit and OpenShell through NVIDIA's build site and run the software through cloud inference providers and NVIDIA Cloud Partners, including Baseten, CoreWeave, DeepInfra, DigitalOcean, Fireworks, Together AI, and Vultr, among others. NVIDIA also said OpenShell can be downloaded from GitHub and run locally on GeForce RTX PCs, RTX workstations, and DGX systems from a range of hardware makers.

The announcement adds to NVIDIA's effort to move beyond selling chips and AI servers by offering more of the software stack needed to build advanced AI systems. It also comes as major software vendors race to define how AI agents will be used inside businesses, even as many products remain in early stages.

NVIDIA said in its release that many of the products and features it described remain in various stages of development and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS.  He can be reached at [email protected].

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