Over the past few months, I’ve noticed something unmistakable in my conversations with customers. We’re no longer talking about what AI agents are capable of and whether they can transform the way we build software. We know the answer. They can. They already are.

The conversations I’m having now instead revolve around a much more sensitive, much more nuanced question: Can we trust these systems? Can we safely place them at the center of our business? That’s the question that’s already defining the next chapter of Agentic AI.

The world has been promised a paradigm-changing productivity boost from AI. For that to happen, we as technology leaders must empower customers with the solutions they need to build and maintain deterministic control over what agents can and can’t do. Developers and businesses alike need to have confidence that AI agents will behave predictably, operate within well-defined boundaries, and remain secure regardless of how quickly the underlying technology evolves.

Trust, not intelligence, will determine what’s truly possible in the agentic era. Intelligence comes from models. Trust comes from the runtime, identity, governance, and security surrounding them. That’s why we’re proud to join the Open Secure AI Alliance and why we’re grateful for NVIDIA’s leadership in bringing together organizations committed to solving this challenge. No single company can take on the task of building this trust alone. Security, safety, and governance have to be built through an open ecosystem that shares responsibility for moving the industry forward.

Speaking of open ecosystems, at Docker, we’ve always believed developers do their best work when they have the freedom to choose. That’s how we got to where we are today. It’s how we reshaped the container ecosystem and earned the trust of more than 20M developers worldwide. And it’s how we’re approaching the agentic era as well. We believe the true power of agentic AI can only be harnessed when customers can seamlessly route between open-weight and frontier models.

But this isn’t just what we believe; it’s what our customers are telling us they want. It’s what they’re telling us they need, today. Almost every customer I talk to has already made open-weight models a core part of their strategy. They need the ability to select the right model for the right task without having to rethink their architecture, rewrite their applications, or compromise on governance, safety, and security every time they make a different choice.

In other words, they need to be able to trust. Building that trust will require all of us. As AI agents become part of every software stack, trust has to extend beyond the model to the environments where agents execute. Docker is proud to help build that foundation alongside NVIDIA and the other members of the Open Secure AI Alliance.