Onetera Brings Agentic Citizen Services to Government with NVIDIA

Onetera to showcase how cities are adopting agentic AI to guide residents and support staff across resident-facing services and internal government operations, powered by NVIDIA Nemotron and OpenShell.

Onetera, the AI-native operating system for local and state government, today announced how its agentic citizen services platform, built on NVIDIA Nemotron with the NVIDIA NemoClaw reference stack and NVIDIA OpenShell for more secure agent operations, is helping cities move beyond static chatbots and forms toward AI agents that guide residents through government services while keeping staff in the loop on every decision. The announcement comes at NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026, running October 20 to 22 at STATION-Berlin.

The application streamlines permitting processes, Onetera's agents support and guide the applicant through the case helping gather documents, identifying potential eligibility and compliance issues against agency-approved program rules, and preparing findings for staff review. That guidance benefits for both city services and residents,applicants get a clearer, faster path to completing what they need, and staff spend less time on manual follow-up and rework, with a person still making every final call. NVIDIA Nemotron supports agent reasoning, while NVIDIA OpenShell provides sandboxing and policy controls that govern what agents can access and which inference endpoints they may use.

From chatbots to agents, with people still in charge

Most public sector AI today answers questions. Onetera's agents help residents and staff get the work done together. A resident applying for rental assistance doesn't just get pointed to a form. An agent guides the conversation, adapts the eligibility path when the resident's circumstances change, and reviews uploaded documents and extracts the relevant data, so the resident always knows what's needed next. That work is handed to a reviewer as a completed, annotated case rather than a folder to sort through by hand, with the staff member making the final decision. The same agentic layer supports the staff side: surfacing case histories, flagging deadlines, and highlighting configuration issues for staff to confirm before program changes go live.

"Cities don't need another chatbot bolted onto a website," said Felix Ruano, CEO of Onetera. "They need agents that can guide a resident and support a staff member the way a capable colleague would, while leaving the decisions where they belong: with people, and entirely inside the city's own network. That's what agentic citizen services means in practice, and it's what we're showing at NVIDIA GTC Berlin."

How the agents work: Nemotron reasoning, OpenShell security

Onetera's agentic architecture pairs two pieces of the Nemotron ecosystem:

• Nemotron 3 Super is the reasoning engine behind each agent, helping decide what to ask next, which eligibility path applies, when to escalate to a human reviewer, and how to interpret uploaded documents and regulatory text within its context window.
• Nemotron 3 Nano handles fast, lightweight classification, routing a resident's message or a staff query to the right workflow before the heavier reasoning model engages.
• NVIDIA OpenShell is what enables organizations to define boundaries over agent operations in the runtime layer as part of NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform. Every agent runs in a sandboxed execution environment with privacy-aware routing and full audit logging, so each step an agent takes to support a case (reading a document, querying a database, preparing an update for staff review) is contained and traceable.
• NVIDIA Blackwell gives Onetera the headroom to run agentic reasoning, embedding, and retrieval concurrently on a single card, with capacity left over for fine-tuning agents on city-specific data.

Together, this allows Onetera agents to support multi-step work on a case, not just generate a response, while staff retain oversight and final say, and without any of that activity leaving the city's controlled infrastructure.

Agentic services in action

• Rental assistance: An agent guides the resident through the full intake conversation, adapting in real time when they mention a job loss, and helps them upload a pay stub and lease agreement, extracting the needed data into a structured case file for staff review, with every step sandboxed and logged.
• Zoning and permitting compliance: An agent uses Nemotron 3 Super to review a proposed setback against locally indexed municipal code and flag potential compliance issues, citing the relevant sections. Staff receive an annotated case to support their review and make the final determination.
• Internal operations: Staff-side agents surface case histories and policy documents, flag configuration conflicts, and highlight issues in new program rules for staff to confirm before they're published. It's the same agentic layer, extended to support the work happening behind the resident-facing front door.

What's next

Onetera plans to fine-tune its agents further using QLoRA on its Blackwell infrastructure. "Agentic AI only works in government if it's trustworthy by architecture and keeps people in the loop, not just by policy," Felix shared. "NVIDIA Nemotron open source models gives our agents the reasoning to genuinely help residents and staff, and NVIDIA OpenShell gives cities the ability to define agent boundaries for control over what agents can access and where they can run."

About Onetera

Onetera is the AI-native operating system for local and state government, one platform for every workflow a government runs, resident-facing and internal. Learn more at onetera.com or reach us at [email protected]

This announcement is being made in connection with NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026, October 20 - 22, at STATION-Berlin, Germany.

Media Contact

Sylvia Jauregui, Onetera, 1 (213) 286-3547, [email protected], www.onetera.com

SOURCE Onetera