Deloitte launches Open Model Engineering practice

New York, NY, USA, 2 September 2026

Key takeaways

• Deloitte’s Open Model Engineering practice is designed to help clients deploy enterprise AI applications with greater flexibility, cost predictability, sovereignty, and enhanced control over their data, intellectual property, model behavior, and inference transparency.
• At the outset, the practice will work with Deloitte firm clients in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific developing enterprise AI applications and products built on open-source AI frameworks and open models.
• Deloitte plans to hire, train, and certify forward deployed engineers through fiscal year 2027 to grow the new practice.

Why this matters

Deloitte today announced the launch of its Open Model Engineering practice in Deloitte firms around the globe. The move is an expansion of Deloitte’s AI services portfolio, reflecting how enterprises and governments are increasingly evaluating open AI models as a way to gain deployment flexibility, manage cost, and increase choices through a mixture of models. Deloitte's new Open Model Engineering practice aims to help organizations design, engineer, deploy and operate AI solutions using open models and full stack open-source engineering tailored to each client’s business requirements, regulatory environment and technology footprint.

“Open models are an increasingly important part of the AI landscape and can complement proprietary AI platforms,” says Nitin Mittal, Deloitte Global AI leader. “By helping organizations take a mixed-model approach to building, deploying, and scaling multi-agent systems, we can help optimize technical choices while preserving flexibility across their AI stack and maximizing return on investment.”

Building an Open Model Engineering practice around the globe

Deloitte firms are rolling out Open Model Engineering services across multiple geographies to help clients evaluate, adopt, and scale open models alongside their existing AI investments, with an initial focus in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

• Enterprises today are navigating four important considerations in AI deployment: flexibility to select the right model and architecture for each workload, predictable cost economics as Agentic AI usage scales, sovereignty over where and how models are deployed, and control over enterprise data, intellectual property (IP), and model behavior with transparency on inference.
• Through Deloitte’s Open Model Engineering practice, Deloitte firms can help clients:
  • Make model and architecture choices selecting from proprietary models, open models, Agentic platforms, cloud services, and/or on-premises infrastructure;
  • Manage token economics by choosing the right model, infrastructure and deployment patterns, resulting in improved return on investment;
  • Provide greater flexibility to build AI applications of open models, while further fine-tuning them for geographical, linguistic and cultural context; and
  • Gain greater choice over where models run, what data is uploaded, and how competitive advantage is retained by protecting IP and the uniqueness of generated inference.
  

Agentic AI capabilities powered by NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models

Deloitte’s Open Model Engineering practice will initially focus on developing enterprise AI applications built on NVIDIA Nemotron open models and NIM microservices. Deloitte firms will also help clients build Sovereign AI stacks using open-source AI frameworks, fine tune open models, and enhance cyber defenses with open harnesses.

“Enterprises need both open and proprietary models for different workloads,” says Kari Briski, vice president of Generative AI at NVIDIA. “Deloitte’s Open Model Engineering practice, built on NVIDIA Nemotron models, gives developers greater control over enterprise data and proprietary information while enabling secure, responsible deployment of Agentic AI.”

As part of this practice, Deloitte firms will leverage the Zora AI™ digital workforce platform, with agentic harness capabilities built on NVIDIA Nemotron open models and NIM. This gives clients a path to deploy, continuously optimize and govern AI agents using open models within their own environments.

Investing in talent: Forward deployed engineers

Deloitte plans to hire, train, and certify forward deployed engineers globally certified in open models. These specialists will work directly alongside Deloitte firm clients to implement open model solutions and will serve as the operational foundation of the new practice.

Click here for more information on Deloitte’s engineering capabilities.