OpenAI launches Frontier platform to help enterprises build and manage AI agents at scale

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 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 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 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 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 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.