NVIDIA wants enterprise AI agents safer to deploy
The NVIDIA Agent Toolkit is Jensen Huang’s answer to the question enterprises keep asking: how do we put AI agents to work without losing control of our data and our liability?
Announced at GTC 2026 in San Jose on March 16, the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit is an open-source software stack designed to help enterprises and developers build autonomous AI agents.
What’s stalling broader deployment is trust. Agents that can take action inside enterprise systems need guardrails, and until now, those have been hard to standardise at scale.
OpenShell and the safety problem
The centrepiece of the toolkit is NVIDIA OpenShell, an open-source runtime that enforces policy-based security and privacy guardrails for autonomous agents. In NVIDIA’s terminology, individual agents are called “claws,” and OpenShell is what keeps them in check.
Huang framed the stakes at GTC: “Claude Code and OpenClaw have sparked the agent inflexion point – extending AI beyond generation and reasoning into action. Employees will be supercharged by teams of frontier and custom-built agents they deploy and manage.”
NVIDIA is working with Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, Microsoft Security, and TrendAI to build OpenShell compatibility into their respective security tools.
Research and cost
Also inside the toolkit is NVIDIA AI-Q, an agentic search blueprint built with LangChain. It uses a hybrid architecture – frontier models handle orchestration while NVIDIA’s open Nemotron models do the research-heavy lifting. According to NVIDIA, this approach can cut query costs by more than 50% while still producing accuracy that tops the DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Bench II leaderboards.
That figure will matter to enterprise buyers who’ve been burned by consumption-based AI pricing that looked manageable in pilots and became a budget problem at scale.
Who’s on board?
The partner list includes Adobe, Atlassian, SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Siemens, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Red Hat, Box, Cadence, Cohesity, Dassault Systèmes, IQVIA, and Synopsys.
Salesforce is building a reference architecture where employees use Slack as the orchestration layer for Agentforce agents – pulling from data in both on-premises and cloud environments – powered by NVIDIA infrastructure. Atlassian is integrating Agent Toolkit into its Rovo AI strategy in Jira and Confluence. ServiceNow’s “Autonomous Workforce of AI Specialists” is built on the toolkit with NVIDIA AI-Q.
And Siemens launched the Fuse EDA AI Agent, which uses NVIDIA Nemotron to autonomously orchestrate workflows in its electronic design automation portfolio, from design conception through manufacturing sign-off. IQVIA’s deployment numbers offer a real-world data point: the company has already deployed more than 150 agents in internal teams and client environments, including 19 of the top 20 pharma companies.
The bigger shift
What NVIDIA is positioning itself as the software infrastructure layer for enterprise agentic deployment. The Agent Toolkit, OpenShell, Nemotron models, AI-Q are components of a stack that NVIDIA wants sitting underneath enterprise software.
The toolkit is available now on build.nvidia.com, with support in AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
See also: AI Expo 2026 Day 1: Governance and data readiness enable the agentic enterprise
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