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.

Frontier debut follows Anthropic enterprise moves

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.”

Could Frontier displace other AI agent platforms?

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.