OpenAI just dropped Frontier, a new enterprise platform that promises to wrangle AI agents the same way companies manage human employees. Available now to early customers including Intuit, State Farm, and Uber, the platform tackles what's becoming a critical enterprise headache - how do you actually deploy, monitor, and control fleets of AI agents when they're scattered across different tools and vendors? It's OpenAI's direct challenge to Microsoft's Agent 365 in the race to become the default operating system for AI workers.
OpenAI is making a calculated bet that the future of enterprise AI isn't about having the smartest models - it's about managing the chaos when dozens or hundreds of AI agents start doing actual work. That's the thinking behind Frontier, the company's new platform that launches today for select enterprise customers.
The pitch sounds almost mundane until you think about what's actually happening inside large organizations right now. Companies are spinning up AI agents for customer service, data analysis, code generation, and dozens of other tasks. But those agents live in disconnected silos, can't share context, and often duplicate work or contradict each other. "Right now, many companies simply run AI agents on top of whatever they're using, which often means fragmented tools, disconnected workflows, and siloed data," Barret Zoph, OpenAI's general manager for business-to-business, told The Verge.
Frontier sits on top of that mess and creates what OpenAI calls a "shared business context" - think of it as the digital equivalent of the company intranet, employee handbook, and org chart rolled into one, but designed for AI agents instead of humans. "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," the company wrote in its blog post announcing the platform.
