OpenAI is best known for its consumer-facing ChatGPT product, but it’s beginning to make some moves in the enterprise space as well.
The company has announced OpenAI Frontier, a new platform designed to help enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents capable of performing real work across their organizations. The platform addresses what OpenAI sees as a critical gap in enterprise AI adoption: the disconnect between what AI models can theoretically accomplish and what companies can actually deploy in practice.
According to OpenAI, 75% of enterprise workers report that AI has enabled them to complete tasks they couldn’t do before. However, the company argues that isolated AI deployments are creating fragmentation rather than efficiency. Each new agent operates in a silo, lacking the broader context needed to function effectively within complex business environments.
Frontier takes a different approach by treating AI agents as coworkers that need the same foundations people require to succeed: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries. The platform connects disparate data sources—from warehouses to CRM systems to internal applications—creating what OpenAI calls a “semantic layer for the enterprise” that all AI agents can reference.
The platform gives AI agents the ability to reason over data, work with files, run code, and use various tools within an open execution environment. Crucially, it includes built-in evaluation and optimization capabilities, allowing agents to learn from experience and improve performance over time. Each AI agent operates with its own identity, explicit permissions, and guardrails, designed to meet enterprise security and governance requirements.
Early adopters include HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber, with existing customers like BBVA, Cisco, and T-Mobile already piloting the platform. OpenAI cites examples of impact from unnamed customers: a manufacturer reduced production optimization work from six weeks to one day, while a global investment company freed up over 90% more time for salespeople to spend with customers.
Built on open standards, Frontier is designed to work with systems companies already have without requiring them to replatform. This allows AI agents to integrate with existing workflows and appear across multiple interfaces—whether through ChatGPT, OpenAI’s Atlas workflow tool, or within existing business applications.
Beyond the technology, OpenAI is pairing the platform with Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who work directly with enterprise teams to develop best practices for building and running agents in production. These engineers also create a feedback loop to OpenAI’s research team, helping inform how the company’s models need to evolve for enterprise use cases.
The company is also opening the platform to third-party developers through the Frontier Partners program, working with AI-native companies including Abridge, Clay, Ambience, Decagon, Harvey, and Sierra to build applications that leverage Frontier’s shared business context.
OpenAI Frontier’s launch comes at a time when AI agents have become mainstream. OpenClaw (previously called ClawdBot and Moltbot) is allowing people to deploy their personal AI agents and have them complete real-world tasks, and Anthropic had launched Cowork which helped knowledge workers automate some of their work. Also, AI agents are able to work autonomously for ever-longer periods as shown in the METR benchmarks. It remains to be seen how OpenAI Frontier is adopted by companies at large, but there is certainly a trend towards creating AI employees that will be able to complement — and perhaps replace — many human workers.