Citrix + NVIDIA: AI Virtual Workstations Are Here

In this episode of The Citrix Session, host Bill Sutton is joined by Todd Smith, recently promoted Senior Manager for Account Technology Strategists (ATS) in the public sector at Citrix. Together, they dive into a pivotal blog article released at Citrix UNITE in New Orleans—“Citrix and NVIDIA Partner to Deliver AI Virtual Workstations.”

What’s Inside:

• What the ATS role really means—and why it matters more than ever
• How Citrix is evolving to support AI workloads using NVIDIA RTX virtual workstations
• The security, scalability, and flexibility of Citrix’s new AI integration
• Why protecting your data from public LLMs is now mission-critical
• Real-world AI use cases in enablement, call centers, and endpoint acceleration

Whether you’re a Citrix veteran or just exploring virtual desktops for AI development, this episode unpacks how Citrix is helping organizations innovate securely and efficiently—with existing infrastructure, enhanced GPU value, and powerful NVIDIA partnerships.

Key takeaway: AI isn’t just for “the nerds in the back room” anymore. Citrix is making it accessible, secure, and scalable—right at the edge of innovation.

Transcript

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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 177 of the Citrix session. I'm your host for today, Bill Sutton. I'm the director of modern workspace with integra for those of you who are not ready, regular listeners

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Bill Sutton: for those of you who are. Thank you very much for those of you who are new. We will be covering a blog article from Citrix, and with me to help is Todd Smith, of of Citrix, Citrix, Todd Todd. You want to introduce yourself real quickly. I know you've got a new title.

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Todd Smith: Sure. Yeah. Thanks. Bill. Yeah. My name is Todd Smith. I'm

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Todd Smith: just recently promoted to a senior manager for

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Todd Smith: the account technology strategists within the public sector for North America. So covering

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Todd Smith: Canada variety of different Us. Government organizations as well as several States. So my team is

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Todd Smith: growing, but we've also pulled in kind of a reorg. We've also added some resources from our professional services team into

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Todd Smith: into my team as well, so working with some of the customers that are on long term professional services engagements.

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Todd Smith: but great to great to be able to join you today, Bill. It's been a while.

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Bill Sutton: For sure I appreciate you joining

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Bill Sutton: Todd. So before we get into the the content or the topic for the day, why don't you. Why don't we just take a step or 2 or 3 back? And tell the the audience

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Bill Sutton: what is an Ats.

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Todd Smith: So an Ats is an account technology strategist, which is really kind of a combination of

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Todd Smith: 3 3 important functions one of them being a sales engineer. Right? So that's traditionally what we were. And it was really focused on those pre-sales engagements. But we found that a lot of the ses were also getting involved in post sales activities, making sure the customers are using what they purchased. The traditional customer success management

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Todd Smith: track of

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Todd Smith: hey? I just bought this stuff. How do I make it work? Type of scenarios? Because in a subscription world you want to make sure that you're using what you're paying for, else you're not going to renew what your what your licenses are. And then the the 3rd kind of key leg of the 3 legged stool is really around that customer support

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Todd Smith: being able to escalate support issues, being able to bring in additional resources to do things like health checks and

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Todd Smith: architecture workshops and direct access to product management. So really, kind of bringing those 3

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Todd Smith: core components into 1, 1 position or one role and really kind of being the quarterback of the entire customer facing organization and being able to work with our sales, reps

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Todd Smith: to make sure the customers are successful in doing what they're doing, and also being able to see

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Todd Smith: intrinsic value in what they're what they purchase and what we can deliver to the customers, or what we're what we're doing for customers.

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Bill Sutton: So that's kind of.

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Todd Smith: Of the that's kind of the role.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. So a big part of that, I think Todd and I think this is this is key is is helping to helping customers understand a what they have.

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Bill Sutton: what they purchased, but also within that purchase you, Citrix keeps adding, this is a positive thing, keeps adding technology to expand the use cases to expand capabilities, and I think part of the trust. Correct me if I'm wrong. Part of the Ats's roles, help them to understand that, and and help to kind of forge a a partnership, to get them to move to the with, to leverage those technologies that they're effectively paying for.

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Todd Smith: A absolutely bill, and being that consistent face of Citrix to to the customer. You know. Obviously, you know, we we've gone through a period of

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Todd Smith: some challenges. But also we've also gone through a period of significant growth when it comes to acquiring new products and acquiring new technologies

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Todd Smith: that needs to be communicated to customers in a fairly rapid pace.

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Todd Smith: and not just have to wait until you know some type of quarterly business review with the customer, or, you know, wait until their renewals coming up next, and then say, Oh, by the way, we've had this for a year.

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Todd Smith: you know you should have known about this, or we. You know we should have told you about this earlier type of thing, because once again, these are these are capabilities that are being added into our portfolio on a regular basis, and the most important part of it is that oftentimes we're not charging any additional fees for this new features that are being added into our universal or platform licenses.

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Bill Sutton: Right? Exactly. Good stuff. Good stuff.

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Bill Sutton: Alright. So we'll move into the topic of the day. We're we're gonna cover a blog article that was released around March 19.th This was in in a concert with the citrix unite meetings held in. Where were they? New Orleans? Yeah.

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Todd Smith: New world.

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Bill Sutton: Thanks so much, Hans.

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Bill Sutton: It's been a while

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Bill Sutton: about a month ago or so in in New Orleans. The article is entitled Citrix and Nvidia partner to deliver AI virtual workstations. And it's written by Sridhar Bulla Putty, who is one of the Co. Ceos of the Citrix unit within Cloud software group. He's been around Citrix a while, hasn't he? Todd.

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Todd Smith: He has. He's he's probably one of the few guys that actually predate me joining Citrix as I just hit my beginning of my 19th year. But Sridar has been with us and he and he and Hector Lima both share the the Co. President role

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Todd Smith: within Citrix as a as an organization under cloud software group. But Sridar's, you know. If you look at what we've what we've acquired over the past several

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Todd Smith: several quarters, and certainly the past year and a half a lot of that. Well, almost everything has had Sridar's fingerprints on it. As far as adding value to our existing portfolio and our existing platform and licensing model. And you know the relationship that we have with Nvidia

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Todd Smith: and really dealing with customers that are that are looking into

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Todd Smith: putting AI and some of those high performance computing requirements directly into their strategy.

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Todd Smith: And not just have it be, you know, not not just having AI being run by the nerds in the back room.

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Todd Smith: These are end users that are having access into AI solutions. So this is this is really exciting areas.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. So Citrix and Nvidia have been partners for a while. This is a a new, a relatively new collaboration that is focused like Todd said, on on empowering and delivering artificial intelligence or AI generative AI. But it could be other types of AI as well.

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Bill Sutton: through Nvidia, virtual Gpu technology now for those of you. But those of our listeners who've been around a while we've we've been able to virtualize the Gpu for a while mostly on Nvidia, but not exclusively

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Bill Sutton: and we. I know that I've done a number of projects where it's been. But it's always almost always been graphics focused. So the ability to accelerate the delivery of of high graphics. Maybe CAD cam type workloads those sorts of things. But this is different, Todd, isn't it. I mean, I think it'll do the same thing. But it's really focused on more, on more, on AI workloads, right.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. And if you look at it, the AI workloads are built differently than a traditional graphics workload, even though they use the same.

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Todd Smith: The same processing power.

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Todd Smith: it's leveraging, you know. It's all it's leveraging a lot more parallel processing as opposed to the serial processing that we're used to.

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Todd Smith: It's doing data data searches as well as trying to do some computations along the way.

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Todd Smith: The

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Todd Smith: the challenge, though, is that a lot of time was being spent on building these unicorns out there for every customer, and what this is going to allow us to do is really

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Todd Smith: bring together the the Citrix desktop as a service capabilities and also leveraging

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Todd Smith: the Nvidia Rtx virtual workstation into one solution that can be used to

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Todd Smith: develop and deliver AI applications and be being able to use a combination. It's not just a, it's not just a everything has to be in the cloud. It can actually leverage local resources within your data centers and also within your local devices. Right? Your endpoints can be brought into the mix as well.

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Todd Smith: this also allows you to to put up some guardrails between what's going on in

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Todd Smith: the cloud areas, the the world, the World Wide Web, and the the Internet, as well as being able to leverage some of the restrictions and compliance programs that keep certain data within your control.

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Todd Smith: So there's a couple of there's a couple of things here.

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Todd Smith: you know, as we look at

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Todd Smith: how this would all work, and.

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Bill Sutton: Bye.

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Todd Smith: We want to be able to take advantage of. You know some of these solutions that are already available. By doing really 3 things. One of them is securing your AI work, your AI Development work.

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Todd Smith: Second, one is really being able to leverage an AI workload isolation. And then the 3rd thing is really helping manage

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Todd Smith: cost and time savings while being scalable.

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Todd Smith: So if we take a look at the the 1st one with securing AI development work.

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Todd Smith: You know

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Todd Smith: the concern that a lot of organizations have is around, okay, how do I do? AI, but do it securely.

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Todd Smith: And this is where

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Todd Smith: our overall zt, and a process or or zt, and a approach which is 0 trust network access, which is really

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Todd Smith: being able to leverage all of the capabilities that Citrix brings to to the market, and being able to do something that we have been doing for

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Todd Smith: 30 years, is really being able to

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Todd Smith: ensure that we can safeguard not only the models and also provide observability into what's going on.

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Todd Smith: but also being able to really with the end goal, being able to protect not only

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Todd Smith: the data in the the systems that are running locally, but also being able to kind of

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Todd Smith: protect it from an AI perspective as well,

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Todd Smith: which can be simple things like requiring you to do searches within a secure environment that maybe

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Todd Smith: you run it on a virtual machine that's inside your citrix environment.

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Todd Smith: It could also be something as simple as making sure that all of the data that's going in and out is passing through a more secure firewall like a web app firewall, or some type of

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Todd Smith: some type of scanning capabilities, right? So being able to to leverage

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Todd Smith: something that we're already doing with our netscalar platforms and our and our historic platforms to be able to leverage that

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Todd Smith: the other. The second one is around leveraging that that workload

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Todd Smith: isolation, right? So being able to control the communications that are happening, reducing those attack surfaces, eliminating, reducing the ability for malicious software to get in there and eliminate the need for the the opportunity for malware to kind of spread between all of the as part of your data packaging once again, this is something that we have been doing as a company for for many years.

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Todd Smith: And then the other piece of it. And this is kind of the more interesting piece of it is that when you start looking at the the compute power and the processing power

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Todd Smith: and the cost associated with doing AI workloads

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Todd Smith: specifically in cloud-based environments. You know, you have to start worrying about what's what's the overall cost going to be?

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Todd Smith: How frequently do I need to be able to spin it up and spin it and take it down in being able to still make sure that I have that highly secure high performance environment, and then being able to scale those up and scale those down as needed.

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Todd Smith: This is where you know.

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Todd Smith: this is what we're doing to help make this a viable solution for a lot of customers.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, I I get it. So I mean to really kind of summarize what you said just now. I mean, it sounds like this solution or this collaboration is.

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Bill Sutton: there's a lot of feet, a lot of things going on here. I mean, obviously, the security element is an important one, being able to isolate isolate the the AI environment and then, of course, like you said cost and scalability. But I'm curious. Todd, this strikes me as a lot from a developer perspective.

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Bill Sutton: When you're developing, you know, you're working with a model and you're developing your AI solution, the ability to run that in a virtualized environment obviously gives developers kind of time shared access, if you will, without having data on their endpoint or data to that, has the ability to leak

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Bill Sutton: or to be compromised. I'm curious about is this, does this solution actually.

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Bill Sutton: at least it's in some way, is it in some way able to leverage the new capabilities of some of these Co. These not co-pilot, but these AI workstations that are running the new. What do they call them? Npus and neural processing units.

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Todd Smith: It? Yeah, it will. And that's and that's certainly one of the areas that we're that we're gonna be working with. You know.

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Todd Smith: partners like Nvidia to to help expand that even further. Right?

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Todd Smith: As we start looking at where those workloads and where those large language models are actually being

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Todd Smith: computed on you're gonna start seeing a lot more endpoints having Nvidia chipsets built into them right? Not just the gaming platforms. Right? I look at

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Todd Smith: you know, my son's got a more powerful computer than I ever had in the data center when I was running data centers. But that's because he's also a, you know, fairly

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Todd Smith: successful professional gamer and

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Todd Smith: that that is really becoming the the. His workstation that he plays games on is going to become

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Todd Smith: the kind of the standard for an AI enabled workstation because it has the processing capabilities built into it to be able to offload some of those workloads, and being able to say, Hey, you know what? I'm going to pull down data sets, or I'm going to start doing some of the queries from my endpoint as opposed to running it in the cloud someplace, because my endpoint may have some of the data that I need, that I don't want to push up into the cloud. So there's a variety of different

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Todd Smith: kind of paradigms that are that are being

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Todd Smith: consolidated here. It's the ever changing

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Todd Smith: situations of where we're doing work, but also where physically, we're doing work. But also where

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Todd Smith: in a, in a technology or holistic approach, where that work is actually being done, whether it's being done in the cloud or in the data center on an endpoint device

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Todd Smith: for a user. It shouldn't really matter as long as it's secure as long as it's fast and as long as it's reliable.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah.

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Bill Sutton: So the next section here is the immediate benefits to citrix customers. So it's interesting. And reading through the article makes reference to the fact that you can. You can leverage

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Bill Sutton: existing Nvidia Gpus, assuming they're of the right model. I suppose the right version in your environment to start prototyping or poc AI apps leveraging those same gpus that you've been perhaps using for other things, or they can be repurposed, or you can obviously implement new. But it. This gives the the customers the ability to approach the strategy differently.

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Bill Sutton: and the 1st one I'll let you comment on all of these, Todd, of course, but the 1st one more confidence than ever. This is one that kind of hits home, because I've read a lot about the public Llms, and how they have a tendency to learn from the prompts and the results of the prompts and customers have to be very careful about putting, and this is a warning that goes out in a lot of organizations. If you use AI generative AI,

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Bill Sutton: make sure you don't put any proprietary information in your prompt because the some of the public Llms. And there's been news articles about people getting fired because IP ended up in the one of the public Llms and by leveraging this technology that it it's designed in a way. That it'll protect the protect the users and administrators from that occurring right.

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Todd Smith: Yeah.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. And and I think a great example of this is what's happening. Just started seeing this over the weekend, everyone's social media is starting to pop up with these little AI generated action figures of who you are and what your interests are.

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Todd Smith: It's basically doing is doing a search on the back end. It's doing a search on all of the public websites about. You know what you like, what you

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Todd Smith: what you want to see and you know it's pretty they're taking. They're looking at your images they're looking at in, you know your little action figure, or at least the representation of your action figure can get pretty damn close, and it shows up some of your hobbies, and

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Todd Smith: you know what your interests are, and things like that which is pretty dangerous, that these large, that these public Llms are really the the amount of data they have access to

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Todd Smith: initially. Now flip that over to a business discussion, and you start thinking. You know you you mentioned earlier, Bill, about the you know

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Todd Smith: people getting in trouble for leaking intellectual property. Well, if if I went to a

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Todd Smith: large language module, and and did a did a search on how to configure a net scaler as an example.

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Todd Smith: I have to be pretty trustful of those sources where it's getting that information from right? So you still need to be able to check and see what's come. What's coming back as

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Todd Smith: some of those responses to those queries that we're putting out there. Those problems.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. And and this solution allows customers to create their own, maybe not create their own Llms, but create their own environment. Maybe they? They use a a public Llm or or a sanitized Llm and then build all the algorithms and the prompt, the prompt engineering, and all of that that goes into it. And it puts it keeps it in their enclave, and, as it were, so that.

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Todd Smith: Michael.

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Bill Sutton: None of that. None of that. None of those queries, none of that data gets leaked out to the public. So the second item under this category is additional value in your Gp and Gpu investment and kind of already talked about this a little bit. But the ability to develop and run and and run Pocs by leveraging Gpus already running in the environment. You want to comment on that a little bit.

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Todd Smith: Yeah, I think a lot of organizations that they've started investing in Gpus, whether it be

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Todd Smith: part of their das environment or part of their overall just a Vdi environment. But we're also seeing investment in gpus on the endpoints as well. We want to make sure that you know a customer can realize and and continue to see value in that. Those investments. By identifying, you know, kind of an additional use case for them to use those.

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Todd Smith: use those endpoints or use those resources, for

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Todd Smith: you know it's not always the the intended purpose that they purchase them for.

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Todd Smith: but in some cases, they can actually, you know, get some additional value by using it for another for another use case or additional use case.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah. And then the last thing indicated here enhanced security. Obviously allowing the users to interact with their app, their AI, their AI apps within the confines or the the borders of the Citrix platform. Obviously

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Bill Sutton: kind of goes back to the the if you arguably the original model, which is the original Citrix model, which is run all your applications in the data center. And this this kind of is a a twist on that a little bit, because you can allow interaction right, Todd, with the local device that ztna or that Spa whatever connection to allow some shared processing to provide the best performance, but still maintain the security that's needed.

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Todd Smith: Yeah.

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Todd Smith: yeah. And I think overall, you know, everyone wants to find a ways to control where people are getting their data, especially when you start looking at?

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Todd Smith: Where on the where, in the Internet, can I go and find additional reliable sources of data

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Todd Smith: that I can, that I can then utilize, for

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Todd Smith: you know my company's business, and being able to say, Hey, is this a credible source? If it's not a credible source, then we want to find a way to automatically block access to it, or at least restrict access to it until we can actually review it and then determine if it's a block or not.

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Todd Smith: It's very similar to the way we used to have remote people coming into our access. We wouldn't grant them immediate access. We put them into a quarantine environment so we could run a series of scans against the endpoint. And then, once they've been validated, let them in.

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Todd Smith: You know, it's. It's a tried and true method.

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Todd Smith: But it works. And it's it's something that you know. Almost every single organization has some form of that

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Todd Smith: least privilege access model where they start granting access based on a history of good behavior, to get them direct access.

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Bill Sutton: So the last section is really just is kind of a a summary in a way. That just talks about the partnership with Nvidia and Citrix.

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Bill Sutton: and you know that clearly here this is another example of Citrix innovating along with a partner to drive development and consumption of AI, which is, is, we have. I've been. I was out of town for the past

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Bill Sutton: 5 weeks. 3 of those weeks were at conferences, and I heard AI numbers a number of times at every conference. So we're hearing that, of course, a lot. And it's becoming ever present in our workday. So really solid thing to see Citrix. continuing to innovate and partner to help drive AI adoption.

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Todd Smith: And it's really interesting how mainstream AI has become. And I'll give you a quick example.

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Todd Smith: You know a lot of the

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Todd Smith: a lot of these conferences, especially the the internal conferences, such as sales and partner, kickoff meetings and things like that for the year.

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Todd Smith: A lot of that. The content was developed, and then you would have to follow up with some type of questionnaire, or you would have to follow up with some type of a meeting to with your manager to determine how much you absorb during that conference, and then sometimes you were, you know.

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Todd Smith: filling out another course, or having to go through another follow up, you know, series of quizzes and and checkpoints. We just implemented a solution that has AI on the back end. And you're actually having a com during your follow up

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Todd Smith: session or your follow up task.

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Todd Smith: You're going through an AI

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Todd Smith: kind of environment where you're talking with someone, and you're presenting what you learned at the conference. And then it's kind of doing some grading. It's giving you some feedback. It's giving you a lot of information that you can then use now

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Todd Smith: traditionally, that would take up to 6 months to do.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Todd Smith: In the old way of doing things. It was a lot of a lot of it was paperwork. A lot of it was, you know individual manual labor. Having to go into this now with the invention, now with the inclusion of AI into the stream, into the work stream.

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Todd Smith: you're able to get almost immediate results.

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Todd Smith: It's comparing

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Todd Smith: all of the people who are doing these tasks at the same time and coming up with, hey, here's some areas that we need to focus on. Here's some areas where we need some reinforcement.

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Todd Smith: And, more importantly, it's almost an immediate

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Todd Smith: return on investment to the to the folks that are creating the content for these sessions

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Todd Smith: to see how effective

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Todd Smith: those readiness opportunities or those readiness activities were. In enablement activities. So it's it's been a it's been interesting. This is the, you know. Once again, this is how AI has been working its way into here. We're seeing a lot of organizations

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Todd Smith: using AI for some of their customer relationship management activities. You know whether it be booking appointments or whether it be a lot of the self

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Todd Smith: help chat bots that are out there on on support sites and things like that, where you know.

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Todd Smith: some of my customers are using those for their call centers. And they're actually getting a lot of valuable information back on what the customers are asking for, where, where they're having problems. So we can identify where they can identify, where there's some need for additional focus, or what are some of the common questions that are coming up that need to be answered? And that's a learning opportunity as well.

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Bill Sutton: Fascinating Todd, and interesting that they all are taking that approach. And it's a great way to get feedback and and understand what's learned at conferences and so forth, rather quickly, so just demonstrates how everything's moving faster. I mean, my my experience with AI is principally been with the, you know, obviously, initially, Chat Gpt. But I've got a co-pilot license. So I use that rel rather frequently to assist

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Bill Sutton: with presentations and drafting emails and things of that nature just putting polish on them. But that's just scratching the surface at this point

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Bill Sutton: lot more we can do with them. And this is a an example of that. So any final thoughts. This is a pretty quick one, which is kind of what I expected this article, but.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. So so once again, it's it's great great getting a chance to get back in the in the cadence with you. And

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Bill Sutton: Likewise.

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Todd Smith: Hopefully. Hopefully. Next week we'll be able to get get Jeremy back on back online and

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Todd Smith: potentially, Andy, I know he and andy and Jeremy did a great job last week on their session. But you know, there's a lot of announcements coming out from Citrix a lot of information, and you know I will

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Todd Smith: give a shameless plug here, you know. Reach out to your Citrix account team, reach out to your partners like Zintegra. You know, there's a lot of information that's coming out of these, you know, whether it be acquisitions or changes in the technology space overall

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Todd Smith: that we're, you know, doing a lot to to make sure that happens, and and make sure that we're keeping abreast of all of those things. So if you have any questions, you know. You had to reach out to Zantegra or Citrix directly.

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Bill Sutton: That's right, all right, Todd, thanks so much.

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Todd Smith: Yep, thank you, Bill.

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Bill Sutton: Talk to everybody soon.

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Todd Smith: Take care!

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Bill Sutton: Bye.