OpenAI Frontier launches to help enterprises build and manage AI agents like human employees

OpenAI launches a way for enterprises to build and manage AI agents | TechCrunch

OpenAI has launched a new product to help enterprises navigate the world of AI agents, focusing on agent management as critical infrastructure for enterprise AI adoption. On Thursday, AI giant OpenAI announced the launch of OpenAI Frontier, an end-to-end platform designed for enterprises to build and manage AI agents, on Thursday. It's an open platform, which means users can manage agents built outside of OpenAI too. Frontier users can program AI agents to connect to external data and applications which allows them to execute tasks far outside of the OpenAI platform. Users can also limit and manage what these agents have access to, and what they can do, of course. OpenAI said Frontier was designed to work the same way companies manage human employees. Frontier offers an onboarding process for agents and a feedback loop that is meant to help them improve over time the same way a review might help an employee. OpenAI touted enterprises including HP, Oracle, State Farm and Uber as customers, but Frontier is currently only available to a limited number of users with plans to roll out more generally in the coming months. The company would not disclose pricing details on a press briefing earlier this week, according to reporting from The Verge. TechCrunch has also reached out for more information regarding pricing. Agent-management products become table stakes since AI agents rose to prominence in 2024. Salesforce has arguably the best-known such product, Agentforce, which the company launched in the fall of 2024. Others have quickly followed. LangChain is a notable player in the space that was founded in 2022 and has raised more than $150 million in venture capital. CrewAI is a smaller upstart that has raised more than $20 million in venture capital. In December, global research and advisory firm Gartner released a report about this type of software and called agent management platforms both the "most valuable real estate in AI" and a necessary piece of infrastructure for enterprises to adopt AI. It's not surprising that OpenAI would release this platform in early 2026 as the company has made it clear that enterprise adoption is one of its main focus areas for this year. The company has also announced two notable enterprise deals this year with ServiceNow and Snowflake. Still, if OpenAI wants to be a meaningful player in the enterprise space, offering a product like Frontier is a promising step.

OpenAI's Frontier wants to manage your AI agents - it could upend enterprise software, too

Like Claude Cowork, Frontier threatens the traditional software industry. OpenAI, which to date has made most of its money from consumer users of ChatGPT, on Thursday took a page from Palantir's playbook, aiming to move deeper into enterprise sales. Palantir is arguably the most successful enterprise AI software company, with revenue of more than $4 billion annually from government and business clients. OpenAI unveiled Frontier, a framework for deploying enterprise artificial intelligence agents; the company said the offering will help companies overcome impediments to deploying agents within organizations. Also: True agentic AI is years away - here's why and how we get there "We're introducing Frontier, a new platform that helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can do real work," said OpenAI in its press release. The framework, it said, "gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries." (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) While details are scant, the Frontier approach appears to lean heavily on "forward-deployed engineers," teams that work on-site with customers to tweak the software to an organization's specific processes and to incorporate what's learned into ongoing software development. "We pair OpenAI forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) with your teams, working side by side to help you develop the best practices to build and run agents in production," said OpenAI. "The FDEs also give teams a direct connection to OpenAI Research." According to OpenAI: As you deploy agents, we learn not just how to improve your systems around the model. We also learn how the models themselves need to evolve to be more useful for your work. That feedback loop, from your business problem to deployment to research and back, helps both sides move faster. Palantir founder and CEO Alex Karp has featured forward-deployed engineers as a key asset that helps the company to integrate its software with customers' processes. "The reason you end up with forward-deployed engineers, especially in the beginning, is you have to extend the product," he said during a keynote address in September. The large language model, such as OpenAI's GPT, said Karp, "is a raw material that has to be processed," and is often "over-hyped" as the savior of businesses. It takes engineering to make it real in deployment, he indicated. Just this week, Palantir touted a partnership with Accenture that will "deploy Palantir's forward-deployed engineers alongside 2,000+ Palantir-skilled Accenture professionals to accelerate AIP [Palantir AI platform] deployment across healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, consumer goods, and financial services." Also: Enterprises are not prepared for a world of malicious AI agents OpenAI's move from being merely an LLM provider to selling a platform for agent deployment will doubtless bring it into conflict with Palantir, C3.ai, and other commercial software firms that have spent years deploying AI with an industry focus. Frontier is currently being used by a "limited set of customers," said OpenAI, including HP, Inc., Intuit, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, and Uber. It will become available more broadly "over the next few months," the company said. Frontier also appears to borrow from Palantir's approach to learning the specifics of industries. Frontier, said OpenAI, will connect various data sources with what it describes as "a semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI coworkers can reference to operate and communicate effectively." That echoes the ontologies that Palantir has promoted as a unique asset, offering a framework for how AI understands the fundamental business terms of an industry. Also: While Google and OpenAI battle for model dominance, Anthropic is quietly winning the enterprise AI race At the same time, OpenAI is clearly moving into the domain of cybersecurity and authorization. The Frontier framework identifies and authorizes AI agents, OpenAI said. "Frontier makes sure AI coworkers operate within clear boundaries. Each AI coworker has its own identity, with explicit permissions and guardrails. That makes it possible to use them confidently in sensitive and regulated environments." Traditional cybersecurity vendors such as Palo Alto Networks have told enterprises that they will be the ones to help identify, authenticate, and grant permissions and place restrictions on AI agents. Also: Claude Cowork automates complex tasks for you now - at your own risk Frontier is both an opportunity and a threat for existing commercial software firms such as Palantir and Palo Alto Networks. On the one hand, it is highly likely that OpenAI will need to partner with those firms to close its own experience gap in enterprise sales. That would require OpenAI to bring those vendors into its deals to make up for what Frontier lacks. On the other hand, Frontier is similar to another program that has cast a shadow over traditional software, the Claude Cowork program from Anthropic. Like Cowork, Frontier could make traditional software packages less important than large language models, which will serve as the front-end user interface for years to come. Also: I let Anthropic's Claude Cowork loose on my files, and it was both brilliant and scary By replacing the user interface of business, Frontier and Cowork could make every commercial software package less important as a choice for business owners. That prospect has lead to a sell-off in recent weeks of software company stocks, which Bloomberg has labeled the "SaaSpocalypse."

OpenAI wants Frontier to manage all your AI agents

OpenAI's description of Frontier sounds something like HR for AI. "Frontier gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. The similarity makes sense: OpenAI said the product was inspired "by looking at how enterprises already scale people." Frontier is available today, though only to an unspecified "limited set of customers, with broader availability coming over the next few months." OpenAI said Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber are among the first companies to adopt OpenAI Frontier, with "dozens of existing customers" having piloted it as well. It's not clear how much Frontier will cost, either. In a press briefing, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser declined to disclose pricing at this point in time.

OpenAI debuts Frontier platform in bid for business bucks

OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That's not confusing at all. The AI biz wants to make it easier for risk-averse organizations to automate workflows with machine learning models, something companies have been loath to do because pilot tests of AI agents often fail to demonstrate meaningful value. OpenAI's adoption of the term "frontier" is particularly confusing given that the company started using it to describe AI models in 2023, shortly before it announced the formation of the Frontier Model Forum. "The Forum defines frontier models as large-scale machine-learning models that exceed the capabilities currently present in the most advanced existing models, and can perform a wide variety of tasks," the AI biz explained at the time. Frontier models thus did not exist - being beyond existing models - but were somehow what forum members developed and deployed. The term is essentially code for leading US commercial AI models, as opposed to alternatives. The company's Frontier platform is something else entirely. It helps orchestrate AI agents in the way that Kubernetes orchestrates containers. "Frontier connects siloed data warehouses, CRM systems, ticketing tools, and internal applications to give AI coworkers that same shared business context," OpenAI explains. "They understand how information flows, where decisions happen, and what outcomes matter. It becomes a semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI coworkers can reference to operate and communicate effectively." Context, in the context of AI models, refers to the tokens available to an LLM, meaning the prompt text, the system prompt, and other data including past conversations and interaction history that seed model output. "Business context" then is information from different systems that's been made available across technical and policy boundaries for AI agents to take action. OpenAI describes Frontier as enabling "AI coworkers" through an "open agent execution environment." "As AI coworkers operate, they build memories, turning past interactions into useful context that improves performance over time," the company explains, leaning into the conceit that agentic systems can replace employees. So, Frontier is a (hopefully) safe space to mingle data from sources like Google Calendar, Salesforce, SAP, and business guidance documents so AI agents can complete automated tasks like answering client sales queries. It sounds simple but clearly isn't - OpenAI is promising to make Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) available to corporate IT teams to help get agent workflows into production. Cobus Greyling, chief evangelist at Kore.ai, which also offers an agent platform for enterprises, told The Register in an email that he doubts organizations will find Frontier all that compelling. "OpenAI Frontier is a name for the frontier of what OpenAI's tech enables, not a thing you install," he explained. "It is basically a collective, informal label for using OpenAI's newest models plus the modern APIs and patterns (Responses API, tool calling, structured outputs, reasoning models, multimodality, agents) together in a loosely coupled, composable way. "There's no monolithic 'Frontier SDK' or framework; you're stitching the pieces together yourself, choosing how tightly or loosely agents, tools, memory, and control logic interact." Greyling said Frontier is not so much a product as a design philosophy that calls for small, stateless model calls, clear role separation, orchestration in code rather than prompts, and decision-making models rather than a monolithic system making decisions. What OpenAI is doing, he argues, is similar to what rivals are doing - moving up the AI stack by shifting focus from the models themselves to the applications, tools, orchestration, and standards that define agents. "This transition commoditizes base models while allowing providers to capture higher value in autonomous agents, enterprise workflows, and interoperability layers," he said.

OpenAI Unveils Platform to Help Companies Deploy 'AI Coworkers'

Frontier will allow companies to integrate with AI agent software from some of OpenAI's rivals, including Anthropic. OpenAI is introducing a new platform that's designed to help companies deploy AI agents more easily, part of a broader push to cement itself as a leader in automating valuable work tasks. The new product, called Frontier, allows organizations to build and manage these AI tools so that each agent has appropriate guardrails and data access. The goal is to simplify the process of rolling out AI agents -- or "AI coworkers," as OpenAI calls them -- and pave the way for broader adoption of the technology among corporate customers. Top AI firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are increasingly betting on AI agents that are meant to field tasks on a person's behalf, with limited need for human intervention. That effort has contributed to a recent market meltdown as investors worry about the impact such tools may have on legacy software providers. The AI startups, meanwhile, are racing to sign up more business clients across various sectors to bolster revenue and offset the immense cost of developing more advanced artificial intelligence software. "We've taken what we've learned from working directly with hundreds of large enterprises about how to build, deploy and manage AI agents and do real work at scale, and we've made that whole process a lot easier," said Fidji Simo, OpenAI's chief executive officer of applications, during a press briefing this week. Notably, OpenAI executives said the platform will allow companies to integrate with AI agent software from some of its rivals, including Anthropic, potentially establishing it as a more of a one-stop-shop for businesses. In the past, Anthropic has sometimes prevented competitors from accessing its underlying technology. Intuit Inc., State Farm and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. are among the companies using the Frontier product, OpenAI said.

OpenAI unveils AI agent service as part of push to attract businesses

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 5 - Your next coworker might be generated by AI. OpenAI on Thursday said it is launching a service, called Frontier, for companies to build and manage so-called artificial-intelligence agents, or AI tools that can complete specific tasks, like fixing a software bug. The platform is part of a broader effort by OpenAI to seize the enterprise market from its rivals - notably the AI startup Anthropic, which draws the bulk of its revenue from companies. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said enterprise growth would be a "huge focus" for his company. The enterprise market is just one of many places where OpenAI and Anthropic are going head-to-head. Both companies are preparing to go public, a process that will pit them against each other for investor attention. The two companies will also be running rival ads during the Super Bowl. Anthropic's ad appears to be a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI's decision to bring ads to ChatGPT, a critique that ruffled feathers at OpenAI on Wednesday. In a post on X, Altman described Anthropic's ad as funny but "clearly dishonest." OpenAI executives said Frontier is meant to work with a company's preexisting infrastructure as well as AI agents built by third parties. That approach means that companies might adopt OpenAI's enterprise tools faster than is otherwise possible, said Fidji Simo, who oversees OpenAI's product and business teams as the startup's CEO of applications. "This is us saying we're going to build an intelligence layer that's going to help every enterprise turn on agents in a much easier way," she said. Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

OpenAI launches new enterprise platform in bid to win more business customers

OpenAI on Thursday announced a new enterprise platform called Frontier, its latest launch as part of its ongoing effort to win more business customers. Frontier acts as an intelligence layer that stitches together disparate systems and data within an organization. OpenAI said the platform will make it easier for companies to manage, deploy and build artificial intelligence agents, which are tools that can independently complete tasks on behalf of a user. "Frontier is really a recognition that we're not going to build everything ourselves," Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, told reporters during a briefing. "We are going to be working with the ecosystem to build alongside them, and we embrace the fact that enterprises are going to need a lot of different partners." OpenAI has been making an aggressive push into the enterprise in recent years, and announced in November that more than 1 million business customers around the world are using the company's technology. Last month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that enterprise customers account for roughly 40% of OpenAI's business, though she expects that figure to reach closer to 50% by the end of the year. OpenAI's new Frontier platform is "complementary" to its existing business offerings, including ChatGPT Enterprise, the company said. "What's really missing still, for most companies, is just a simple way to unleash the power of agents as teammates that can operate inside the business without the need to rework everything underneath," Denise Dresser, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, said during the briefing. "That's exactly why we've built Frontier."

OpenAI Enters a New Frontier: Trying to Make Money

For a while, OpenAI was considered to have the best frontier AI model in the business. Now that it has seemingly been surpassed in some key categories by competitors like Google and Anthropic, it's settling for just launching a product called Frontier instead. On Thursday, the company announced a new enterprise platform that will seek to attract business customers by offering a dedicated space to build, deploy, and manage AI agents. According to OpenAI, Frontier is meant to be a platform that connects different parts of the enterprise platform, working across the corporate ecosystem to complete assigned tasks autonomously without upending their existing operations. That is to say, if a company is already running Salesforce's Customer Relationship Management tools, Frontier allows businesses to configure their agents to work with that rather than needing OpenAI to build its own CRM offering. "Frontier gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries. That’s how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers that work across the business," the company said. It's also claiming a long list of early adopters to Frontier, including HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, and Uber. OpenAI is positioning the launch of Frontier as an attempt to close the "opportunity gap" between the massive amount of data available within a company's existing stack and the ability to use AI to do something with all of that information. But more than that, it's an attempt at closing the "opportunity gap" between OpenAI and generating revenue. Currently, the company reportedly boasts more than 900 million monthly active users, but only 5% of those reportedly pay for the service. The only place the company really shows meaningful potential for revenue is with enterprise customers, who account for about 40% of OpenAI's revenue. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said during an appearance at Davos that they expect that to push up to 50% by the end of this year. The company also has a lot of room to grow there, as it holds just 27% of the total market, according to a recent report from Menlo Ventures. Unfortunately for them, that's because they have gotten squeezed by competitors. In the last two years, Anthropic has skyrocketed to the top spot in enterprise AI offerings thanks to its powerful coding model, and in the last year, Google has nearly doubled its share of the market with the release of Gemini 3. Frontier is OpenAI's attempt to get back in the driver's seat. If it doesn't work, the company may be closer to being on the edge of oblivion than anything.

OpenAI launches centralized agent platform as enterprises push for multi-vendor flexibility

OpenAI launched Frontier, a platform for building and governing enterprise AI agents, as companies increasingly question whether to commit to single-vendor systems or maintain multi-model flexibility. The platform offers integrated tools for agent execution, evaluation, and governance in one place. But Frontier also reflects OpenAI's push into enterprise AI at a moment when organizations are actively moving toward multi-vendor architectures -- creating tension between OpenAI's centralized approach and what enterprises say they want. Tatyana Mamut, CEO of the agent observability company Wayfound, told VentureBeat that enterprises don't want to be locked into a single vendor or platform because AI strategies are ever-evolving. "They're not ready to fully commit. Everybody I talk to knows that eventually they'll move to a one-size-fits-all solution, but right now, things are moving too fast for us to commit," Mamut said. "This is the reason why most AI contracts are not traditional SaaS contracts; nobody is signing multi-year contracts anymore because if something great comes out next month, I need to be able to pivot, and I can't be locked in." How Frontier compares to AWS Bedrock OpenAI is not the first to offer an end-to-end platform for building, prototyping, testing, deploying, and monitoring agents. AWS launched Bedrock AgentCore with the idea that there will be enterprise customers who don't want to assemble an extensive collection of tools and platforms for their agentic AI projects. However, AWS offers a significant advantage: access to multiple LLMs for building agents. Enterprises can choose a hybrid system in which an agent selects the best LLM for each task. OpenAI has not made it clear if it will open Frontier to models and tools from other vendors. OpenAI did not say whether Frontier users can bring any third-party tools they already use to the platform, and it didn't comment on why it chose to release Frontier now when enterprises are considering more hybrid systems. But the company is working with companies including Clay, Abridge, Harvey, Decagon, Ambience, and Sierra to design solutions within Frontier. What is Frontier Frontier is a single platform that offers access to different enterprise-grade tools from OpenAI. The company told VentureBeat that Frontier will not replace offerings such as the Agents SDK, AgentKit, or its suite of APIs. OpenAI said Frontier helps bring context, agent execution, and evaluation into a single platform rather than multiple systems and tools. "Frontier gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries. That's how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI co-workers that work across the business," OpenAI said in a blog post. Users can connect their data sources, CRM tools, and other internal applications directly to Frontier, effectively creating a semantic layer that normalizes permissions and retrieval logic for agents built on the platform to pull information from. Frontier has an agent executive environment, which can run on local environments, cloud infrastructures, or "OpenAI-hosted runtimes without forcing teams to reinvent how work gets done." Built-in evaluation structures, security, and governance dashboards allow teams to monitor agent behavior and performance. These give organizations visibility into their agents' success rates, accuracy, and latency. OpenAI said Frontier incorporates its enterprise-grade data security layer, including the option for companies to choose where to store their data at rest. Frontier launched with a small group of initial customers, including HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber. Security and governance concerns Frontier is available only to a select group of customers with wider availability coming soon. Enterprise providers are already weighing what the platform needs to address. Ellen Boehm, senior vice president for IoT and AI Identity Innovation at Keyfactor, told VentureBeat that companies will still need to focus their agents on security and identity. "Agent platforms like OpenAI's Frontier model are critical for democratizing AI adoption beyond the enterprise," she said. "This levels the playing field -- startups get enterprise-grade capabilities without enterprise-scale infrastructure, which means more innovation and healthier competition across the market. But accessible doesn't mean you skip the fundamentals." Salesforce AI executive vice president and GM Madhav Thattai, who is overseeing an agent builder and library platform at his company, noted that no matter the platform, enterprises need to focus agents on value. "What we're finding is that to build an agent that actually does something at scale that creates real ROI is pretty challenging," Thattai said. "The true business value for enterprises doesn't reside in the AI model alone -- it's in the 'last mile.'" "That is the software layer that translates raw technology into trusted, autonomous execution. To traverse this last mile, agents must be able to reason through complexity and operate on trusted business data, which is exactly where we are focusing."

OpenAI launches platform to manage AI agents

Why it matters: OpenAI is stepping up its push into enterprise services as rivals gain ground with business customers. Driving the news: OpenAI's Frontier is meant to help companies integrate and manage AI agents inside business applications, said Denise Dresser, chief revenue officer at OpenAI. * "What's really missing still for most companies is just a simple way to unleash the power of agents as teammates that can operate inside the business without the need to rework everything," Dresser said on a briefing call with reporters. Between the lines: OpenAI is pitching Frontier as a solution to companies lacking the tools to manage the waterfall of AI capabilities coming their way, including features like: * Identity and governance: Each agent gets a defined identity, explicit permissions, and guardrails aimed at regulated environments. * Quality improvement: Built-in evaluation and optimization tools to help agents learn what good work looks like over time through feedback. * Shared business context: Connects data warehouses, CRMs, ticketing tools, and internal apps so agents can understand enterprise-specific workflows. * Execution environment: Allows agents to plan and act across files, tools and code in a dependable runtime that can run locally, in an enterprise cloud, or OpenAI-hosted. Zoom in: Dozens of companies have already adopted Frontier, including Intuit, Uber, State Farm and Thermo Fisher. * A global financial services firm using the technology got 90% more time back for their client-facing team, according to OpenAI. * Another customer in tech said it saved 1,500 hours a month in its product development. Zoom out: This is a move for OpenAI to compete with Anthropic and Google, both of which are viewed as more competitive when it comes to enterprise adoption. * Claude Code and Cowork cemented Anthropic as a tool for major business customers, ranging from engineering teams to lawyers. * Google's strong existing relationships with enterprises gives it a leg up as well. What they're saying: "OpenAI's broad focus gave them success early, but I think it's coming back to bite them right now," Greg Osuri, founder and CEO of Overclock Labs, told Axios. * OpenAI's general purpose approach may present scaling challenges as other AI firms race to increase revenue through wider enterprise adoption. The bottom line: Managing AI agents is fast becoming a major enterprise challenge, and OpenAI wants to be the system that keeps them in check. Disclosure: Axios and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access part of Axios' story archives while helping fund the launch of Axios into four local cities and providing some AI tools. Axios has editorial independence.

OpenAI launches Frontier -- and potentially redraws the enterprise software map | Fortune

OpenAI is making its most aggressive move into the corporate world yet with the launch of Frontier, an enterprise platform to build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can run other software, such as Salesforce and Workday. Frontier appears to be OpenAI's bid to become the "operating system of the enterprise," offering a unified platform for building agents that can navigate apps, execute workflows, and make decisions. In a blog post announcing the new platform, OpenAI says that Frontier can connect databases, business systems of record for things like customer relationship management software and human resources, ticketing tools, and other internal applications, and then allow AI agents to run processes over these systems. The company described Frontier as "a semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI coworkers can reference to operate and communicate effectively." It said that human employees could work on the same platform, so that both humans and AI had access to all the same data and tools, with similar access controls and security provisions. OpenAI has signed up a number of well-known Fortune 500 companies as initial customers of Frontier, including Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber. OpenAI's debut of Frontier follows a series of moves by its rival Anthropic to also make it easier for enterprise customers to build agents that use other business software and run corporate workflows, as well as to spin up bespoke software. Last month, Anthropic debuted Claude Cowork, which allows users to use its Claude AI model in an agentic way across common business software. And this week, Anthropic launched open-source plugins for Cowork that target tasks in specific professional sectors, such as legal work or marketing. The combined rollout of Anthropic's and OpenAI's new agentic AI systems for enterprises has spooked investors in traditional big enterprise SaaS companies, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, and Microsoft. The concern is that the AI native upstarts, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, will increasingly disintermediate the relationship those big SaaS providers have with their customers and will obviate the need for these customers to upgrade to the AI agent offerings the SaaS giants themselves are offering. That could dent the growth prospects of these SaaS companies. In some cases, it might replace the need to have this SaaS software at all. For instance, if a Frontier agent can execute sales workflows without a human ever logging into Salesforce, the 'per-seat' licensing fees that currently powers the SaaS economy could lose its justification. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, said in a media briefing that when she was the CEO of Instacart, giving her teams access to the best AI tools meant having to assess hundreds of different software vendors and then a complicated and time-consuming effort to get those tools embedded into enterprise workflows. "We spent months integrating each of the ones that we selected," she said, adding that "we didn't even get what we actually wanted, because each tool was good for one use case, but they weren't integrated or talking to one another, so we were just reinforcing silos upon silos." Instead, she said she dreamed of one platform to create and manage all of an organization's agents. "Now that I am at OpenAI, every CEO has asked me, where is this all going? I tell them that it's about humans and AI collaborating on one platform." Simo insisted that the platform is meant to embrace established enterprise software vendors, not displace them. She calls Frontier "a recognition that we're not going to build everything ourselves, we are going to be working with the ecosystem to build alongside them, and we embrace the fact that enterprises are going to need a lot of different partners." She said for some software companies, Frontier could become an important distribution channel -- a way "to get them inside large companies, and for large companies to adopt these foreign solutions without fragmenting their systems even further." But companies like Salesforce have staked their future on AI agent platforms. Salesforce's billion-dollar 'Agentforce' initiative envisions companies building fleets of autonomous agents that live directly inside its CRM software. Microsoft's Copilot Agents are designed to do the same thing across Microsoft 365 products. These companies are betting that customers will want agents that are deeply embedded in their 'systems of record' -- where the data actually lives -- rather than a generalist agent from OpenAI that sits on top of every system. This is not OpenAI's first foray into the enterprise, but it signals a philosophical shift. When the company launched "ChatGPT Enterprise" in 2023, the pitch was strictly about empowering human employees. OpenAI is now offering agents that are more about automating workflows -- logging into applications, executing tasks, and managing tasks without much human hand-holding.

OpenAI's New Platform Brings AI Agents Into Enterprise Workflows

It supports agents from OpenAI, in-house teams, and third-party builders OpenAI on Thursday introduced Frontier, a new enterprise platform for artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The San Francisco-based AI giant said the platform is designed to bridge the growing divide between agentic tools and their practical use inside large businesses. The new platform will act as a space that helps AI agents get "work-ready" with shared context, clear permissions and boundaries, and detailed instructions about how to function. The launch arrives as businesses face mounting pressure to move AI beyond small experiments into core operations, yet many struggle with disconnected data sources, isolated agents and the rapid pace of model updates. OpenAI Launches Frontier for AI Agents In a post, the company announced and detailed its new enterprise platform. Frontier is described as a unified system that lets businesses build and deploy AI agents capable of performing real work within the existing systems. The platform will host OpenAI's agents, those built by the businesses, as well as third-party AI agents. Making the announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X (formerly Twitter), "The companies that succeed in the future are going to make very heavy use of AI. People will manage teams of agents to do very complex things. Today, we are launching Frontier, a new platform to enable these companies." With Frontier, AI agents gain access to the same information flow as human employees, with clearly defined limits. These tools can reference data warehouses, CRM records, ticketing systems, and internal applications to understand decisions, processes and outcomes. OpenAI says this shared context helps agents build institutional memory over time, much like new employees learn on the job. Frontier handles the full lifecycle. It includes onboarding steps that allow agents to be set up quickly, even by non-technical teams. Agents receive hands-on feedback that improves their performance, and they operate under explicit identity controls, permissions and guardrails. The platform supports execution in local environments, private clouds or OpenAI-hosted runtimes, and it works with open standards so organisations avoid major replatforming. Several enterprises have already adopted or tested the approach. HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher and Uber are among the first wave of users. Banks and telecom companies such as BBVA, Cisco and T-Mobile have run pilots focused on more complex AI tasks, the post stated. Notably, Frontier is available now to a limited group of customers. OpenAI plans to expand access over the coming months.

OpenAI launches Frontier after Claude Cowork -- could it replace Salesforce and Workday? What it does and why it matters

OpenAI launches Frontier, an AI agent platform designed to automate workflows across Salesforce, Workday, and enterprise software. Enterprise SaaS stocks plunged 14%. This "Agentic OS" automates complex workflows. It replaces costly seat-based licenses with outcome-based AI compute. While Anthropic's Claude Cowork gained an early lead in personal productivity and "digital colleague" workflows, OpenAI Frontier is built for architectural scale. Frontier manages autonomous fleets across Salesforce and Workday data silos. It cuts administrative costs by 65%. Unlike Claude Cowork, it offers a central control plane. Businesses now "hire" AI agents.

OpenAI Says AI Agents Need to Be Managed Like Humans | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. This week the company introduced OpenAI Frontier, a platform designed to help organizations build, deploy and manage artificial intelligence (AI) agents with the same structure and oversight companies give human workers. According to OpenAI, many firms today simply layer agents onto existing systems, leading to fragmented workflows, disconnected tools and siloed data. Frontier is available immediately to a "limited set of customers" with broader availability planned over the coming months, OpenAI says. The company listed Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher and Uber among the initial adopters, and added that "dozens of existing customers" have already piloted the platform. The timing of Frontier's launch reflects a growing enterprise realization as outlined by Fortune that companies struggle to operationalize agentic AI at scale because there is no consistent way to manage autonomy, permissions, compliance or accountability once agents start operating across teams. Many organizations initially create agents that plug directly into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Workday or internal apps, but those agents often lack a shared business context and cannot reliably communicate or collaborate with one another. OpenAI's thesis with Frontier is that agents are more like digital co-workers than standalone scripts: They need context about business processes, access to tools and systems with governed permissions, and a management layer that tracks performance and outcomes. Without that, enterprises risk islands of intelligent automation that boost productivity in one corner but create governance blind spots elsewhere. In this sense, Frontier is positioned as a unifying layer on top of existing enterprise infrastructure one that can tie agents into centralized data sources, shared workflows and defined security boundaries. The goal is to reduce fragmentation and ensure that agents "know" the same business rules, objectives and guardrails that human workers do. OpenAI's own framing of Frontier emphasizes that agents should not be ephemeral experiments, but entities with identity, memory and life cycle management. In revealing the product, executives said agents on Frontier will operate with a common context, have defined roles, be able to communicate with other agents, and be traceable, all features that mirror the way organizations govern people. The Wall Street Journal described Frontier as a way to build "AI co-workers" that connect into enterprise workflows, with centralized oversight that aligns agent behavior with business norms. The distinction matters because many legacy automation tools and point solutions lack the ability to manage agents once they span multiple departments or software platforms. Parallel moves in the market highlight the same trend: Anthropic recently introduced its "cowork" capabilities aimed at turning its Claude models into customizable collaborators tailored to specific jobs, and it has expanded plugin support to help enterprises bind those agents to particular functions and tools. Treating agents like workers has practical implications beyond semantics. Firms that cannot trace decisions back to governed policies risk compliance failures, inconsistent behavior and operational risk when agents handle sensitive tasks such as customer support, claims processing or supply chain decisions. Fortune coverage emphasized that enterprises considering autonomous AI must win trust not just from technologists, but from compliance, security and business leadership. As competition intensifies with offerings like Anthropic's cowork system and other platform players integrating agents into broader enterprise systems, the ability to manage autonomy at scale could become a key differentiator. PYMNTS has earlier reported on Open AI's data about employees using AI tools save more than an hour daily on tasks including email composition, document analysis and research. However, these individual productivity improvements do not automatically translate into enterprise value without proper integration and governance structures.

OpenAI unveils AI agent service as part of push to attract businesses

OpenAI is launching a new service called Frontier. This platform will help companies create and manage artificial intelligence agents. These AI tools can perform specific tasks. This move puts OpenAI in direct competition with rival Anthropic. Both companies are also preparing for public offerings and will run competing advertisements during the Super Bowl. OpenAI on Thursday said it is launching a service, called Frontier, ⁠for companies to build and manage so-called artificial-intelligence agents, or AI tools that can complete specific tasks, like fixing a software bug. The platform is part of a broader effort by OpenAI to seize the enterprise market from its rivals - notably the AI startup Anthropic, which draws the bulk of its revenue from companies. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said enterprise growth would be a "huge focus" for his company. The enterprise market is just one of many places where OpenAI and Anthropic are going head-to-head. Both companies are preparing to go public, a process that will pit them against each other for investor attention. The two companies will also be running rival ads during the Super Bowl. Anthropic's ad appears to be a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI's decision to bring ads to ChatGPT, a critique that ruffled feathers at OpenAI on Wednesday. In a post on X, Altman described Anthropic's ad as funny but "clearly dishonest." OpenAI executives said Frontier is meant to work with a company's preexisting infrastructure as well as ⁠AI agents built by ⁠third parties. That approach means that companies might adopt OpenAI's enterprise tools faster than is otherwise possible, said Fidji Simo, who oversees OpenAI's product and business teams as the startup's CEO of applications. "This is us saying we're going to build an intelligence layer that's going to help every enterprise turn on agents in a much easier way," she said.