OpenAI now wants every big company worker to sit next to an AI coworker that never sleeps. The firm has rolled out Frontier, a platform that lets businesses create, deploy, and control AI agents across their daily software tools.
These agents can fix software bugs, answer customer tickets, work with files, and even run code, all while following strict rules and permissions set by IT and security teams. With Frontier, OpenAI is racing rivals like Anthropic to win long‑term enterprise budgets and become the default brain behind digital work.
What Frontier actually does inside a company
Frontier is built as an enterprise platform, not just another chatbot, and it plugs into the systems where work already happens.
Key things Frontier brings to the IT stack:
- Connects to data warehouses, CRM, ERP, ticketing tools, and internal apps to give agents real business context.
- Lets agents reason over data, use tools, work with files, and run code in an execution environment tuned for production workloads.
- Creates “AI coworkers” that can sit inside functions like finance, support, and engineering, learning from feedback and building memory over time.
- Offers controls for identity, access, security, and compliance so each agent only sees what it should see.
OpenAI describes this stack as an intelligence layer for the enterprise, a semantic layer that all AI agents can reference when they need to understand how the business really works. The goal is that agents don’t just answer isolated prompts but act inside ongoing workflows with shared context.
Why OpenAI needs this enterprise push now
Enterprise AI has become one of the hardest and richest battlegrounds in the AI race. Anthropic already earns most of its revenue from corporate customers, and both firms are preparing for public offerings that will shine a spotlight on recurring enterprise contracts.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has called enterprise growth a “huge focus,” and Frontier is built to address exactly that pressure. The platform is meant to shorten the slow part of AI projects: integration, onboarding, and governance, not just the model quality itself.
To attract conservative buyers, OpenAI is pairing its models with forward‑deployed engineers who sit with customer teams to build and run agents in production. That approach turns the platform into a service and a partnership, not just an API drop‑in.
Early customers, use cases, and impact on software vendors
Frontier is already in the hands of major enterprises, even though access is still limited.
Companies reported as adopters or pilots include:
- HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber as active Frontier users.
- Large existing OpenAI customers such as BBVA, Cisco, and T‑Mobile that have tested the agent‑driven approach.
- AI‑native partners like Abridge, Clay, Ambience, Decagon, Harvey, and Sierra in a Frontier Partners program.
These deployments focus on:
- Revenue operations and sales workflows, where agents can move across CRM and billing data.
- Customer support, where agents triage tickets, draft replies, and update records across tools.
- Software engineering, where agents read logs, file issues, and suggest fixes.
The launch also rattled parts of the software market, with some enterprise software stocks dipping as investors priced in the risk of AI agents automating tasks that current tools monetize. For OpenAI, though, each successful deployment tightens its grip as the orchestration layer between workers, data, and existing SaaS products.
Security, governance, and the trust question
Enterprise buyers keep asking one basic question: can they trust autonomous agents inside sensitive systems. Frontier tries to answer that with a mix of identity, access management, and compliance certifications.
Core trust features include:
- Agent identities that can be scoped with fine‑grained permissions, mirroring human user roles.
- Guardrails to limit what an agent can do in regulated environments like finance, healthcare, and insurance.
- A security baseline built on standards such as SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC frameworks.
At the same time, regulators in other parts of the world are warning about risks tied to powerful autonomous agents, underscoring that governance is now a global policy topic, not just an internal IT checklist. How OpenAI balances speed with safety on Frontier will shape both its enterprise growth and how rivals argue about risk.
What this means for CIOs and tech teams
For CIOs, Frontier’s pitch is simple: agents that can sit on top of existing systems instead of forcing a replatform. For builders, the platform offers an environment where they can design agents that use tools, run code, and evolve with feedback, without stitching together their own orchestration stack.
In practice, that could shift AI projects from isolated pilots to “AI coworkers” sitting inside each function, from HR to procurement to engineering. As more enterprises treat AI agents as first‑class digital workers, platforms like Frontier may become as central as CRMs and ERPs in the next generation tech stack.
(Source: openai)
