LONDON – Nutanix set out its stall for the AI token problem, positioning itself as the AI control plane vendor of choice.
In an existential keynote at its .Next 2026 event, CRO Andrew Brinded answered the question of what purposes Nutanix serves. Where that answer was once solely hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), he argued it was now solving the “explosion” in token costs.
“It’s a board-level discussion. CFOs are looking at the cost of tokens and saying, ‘What do we do about it? Are we getting a return on investment?’” Brinded said.
For Nutanix, this revolves around its AI agent offering, Nutanix Agent Gateway, which the exec said provides control and governance of data and management. The CRO said this played into Nutanix’s “sweet spot,” allowing for bread-and-butter role-based access, cost monitoring, and even a kill switch.
“You’ve seen so many stories of token costs getting outrageous,” Brinded explained. “The ability to kill that off as IT leaders when you see that happening is vital.”
Sovereignty Next #
Nutanix also sees this as important for "geopolitical reasons” by helping to pick models to suit a company’s individual sovereignty setting.
Digital sovereignty was underlined by Adam Tarbox, VP and GM for EMEA North at Nutanix, who noted research claiming 80% of IT leaders feel sovereignty is a key priority in infrastructure decisions.
“Look at what's going on in digital sovereignty, and it's a big challenge in the U.K. It's a challenge for how we gain control of geopolitical events. If things do change, our CIOs and our board are asking us, well, how are we going to pivot?” Tarbox said.
Sovereignty saw Nutanix tout on stage its partner role on European sovereign cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon’s director for EMEA specialists Kamini Aisola said its customers “want to understand how they can manage all of this change with all of the constraints that they are facing, regulatory constraints as well.”
Control is key #
In other words, customers want more control, and control was a keyword at Nutanix .Next; mentioned more so than Broadcom, in fact. While Nutanix CTO Manosiz Bhattacharyya mentioned current complexities of moving off VMware, the exec’s message to the audience was providing a bridge of sorts between Nutanix past and present, saying that its HCI roots represented a goal “to provide infrastructure as software components on commodity servers.”
“Agentic systems might need way more compute density than you need for traditional infrastructure. So we will give you all these capacities and differences and operate it in a very singular way … Everything that we built for the data center now we can move it to the public cloud because we actually built it as software,” Bhattacharyya said.
CRO Brinded finished his part of the presentation by mentioning Broadcom, admitting some may have found the tardy reference surprising while touting 32,000 customers who've made the jump from VMware to Nutanix.
“The reason I left it to last is it's just much more than the migration of VMs (virtual machines). It's the ability to … have a container environment. And of course, on containers, the most modern application is AI.
“(With Nutanix) you're committing to a platform that is future-proofing you. It's future-proofing you whether you're at the edge in the data center or managing public clouds. It's future-proofing you whether you want to run VMs or containers, or have an environment for agentic AI,” Brinded said.