With the launch of Frontier, OpenAI is taking its most aggressive step yet into the enterprise world. Frontier is an enterprise platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents that can run other software such as Salesforce and Workday.
Frontier appears to be OpenAI’s goal to become an “enterprise operating system,” providing a unified platform for building agents that can navigate applications, execute workflows, and make decisions. in blog post OpenAI said in announcing the new platform that Frontier can connect to business systems of record such as databases, customer relationship management software and human resources, ticketing tools and other internal applications, and then allow AI agents to run processes on those systems.
The company describes Frontier as a “semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI colleagues can reference to operate and communicate effectively.” Human employees can work on the same platform, so humans and AI have access to all the same data and tools, with similar access controls and security provisions, it said.
OpenAI has signed several well-known Fortune 500 companies as Frontier’s initial customers, including Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, Uber, etc.
Frontier debuts as Anthropic ventures relocate
OpenAI’s first launch of Frontier follows a series of moves by rival Anthropic to make it easier for enterprise customers to build agents that use other commercial software and run enterprise workflows, as well as launch custom software. Last month, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, which allows users to use its Claude AI models as agents in common business software. This week, Anthropic launched Cowork, an open source plugin designed to target tasks in specific professional areas, such as legal work or marketing.
The new enterprise agent AI system launched by Anthropic and OpenAI has spooked investors in traditional large enterprise SaaS companies such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP and Microsoft. The concern is that AI-native upstarts like OpenAI and Anthropic will increasingly eliminate the relationship between large SaaS providers and their customers, and eliminate the need for those customers to upgrade to the AI agent offerings offered by the SaaS giants themselves. This could dampen the growth prospects of these SaaS companies.
In some cases, it may completely replace the need for SaaS software. For example, if Frontier agents could execute sales workflows without manually logging into Salesforce, the “per-seat” licensing fees that currently power the SaaS economy might lose their legitimacy.
OpenAI Applications CEO Fidji Simo said at a media briefing that when she was CEO of Instacart, getting her team the best AI tools meant having to evaluate hundreds of different software vendors and then do the complex and time-consuming work of embedding those tools into enterprise workflows. “We spent months integrating every tool we picked,” she said, adding, “We didn’t even get to what we really wanted because each tool fit a use case, but they didn’t integrate or talk to each other, so we were just hardening in one silo after another.”
Instead, she said she dreams of a platform to create and manage all of an organization’s agents. “Now that I’m at OpenAI, every CEO asks me, where is this all going? I tell them it’s about humans and AI collaborating on a platform.”
Can Frontier replace other AI agent platforms?
Simo insists that the platform is designed to embrace established enterprise software vendors, not replace them. She said Frontier “recognizes that we’re not going to build everything ourselves, we’re going to build it with the ecosystem, and we embrace the fact that enterprises are going to need a lot of different partners.”
For some software companies, she said, Frontier could become an important distribution channel — a “way to get them into larger companies that can adopt these foreign solutions without further fragmenting their systems.”
But companies like Salesforce have staked their future on AI agent platforms. Salesforce’s multibillion-dollar “Agentforce” initiative envisions companies building autonomous agent teams that reside directly within its CRM software. Microsoft’s Copilot Agent is designed to do the same thing within Microsoft 365 products. The companies are betting that customers will want agents that are deeply embedded in their “systems of record” (where the data actually lives), rather than generic agents from OpenAI that sit on top of every system.
This isn’t OpenAI’s first foray into the enterprise, but it marks a shift in philosophy. When the company launched “ChatGPT Enterprise” in 2023, its pitch was focused on empowering employees. The agents now provided by OpenAI are more about automating workflows – logging into applications, performing tasks and managing tasks without much human intervention.
This story was originally published on wealth network