OpenAI Expands Enterprise Push With Frontier AI Agent Platform

In Brief

• Frontier allows enterprises to build, deploy and manage AI agents across systems.
• Agents gain access to shared business context and operate within defined boundaries.
• The company aims to reduce complexity and improve productivity through scalable, secure AI coworkers. 

OpenAI made a big play for the enterprise today with the launch of Frontier. Frontier is a one-stop shop for enterprise oversight and management of "AI coworkers" that can operate across existing business systems. The platform works with all agents, whether third-party, custom developed or purchased from OpenAI.  

Frontier is OpenAI's answer to a growing gap it identified between AI model capabilities and real-world enterprise deployment.

Frontier is the fifth product release of 2026 for OpenAI and is the first of the year specific for business use. The rate of announcements, partnerships and product releases is overwhelming at times and shows the multi-front approach to growth the company is taking. The 2026 product launches alone include:

• ChatGPT Health — A consumer health app meant to "support, not replace" medical advice for individuals
• GPT-5.2-Codex — The company's most advanced coding agent for software developers and programmers
• Prism — A collaborative research tool directed at scientists, researchers and academic teams
• Codex App — A coding application geared towards individual developers and coding enthusiasts
  

The company claims over 1 million businesses have used AI agents in recent years, citing success stories such as a semiconductor manufacturer that reduced chip optimization work from six weeks to one day.

Frontier Platform Features

Frontier's strength in large part is the context the agents gain access to through integrations with enterprise systems. OpenAI discusses the platform in terms reminiscent of an HR department, down to giving each agent its own "employee ID": "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."

Feature	Description
Shared business context	Connects data warehouses, CRM and internal apps for unified agent awareness
Agent execution environment	Enables reasoning, file handling, code execution across cloud and local runtimes
Evaluation and optimization	Built-in tools to assess and improve agent performance over time
Identity and permissions	Each agent receives an employee ID, with explicit access controls and guardrails
Forward Deployed Engineers	OpenAI staff pair with enterprise teams for deployment support

Frontier Enters a Competitive Landscape

OpenAI is a late entry in the race to act as the center of AI agent operations. Competition includes frenemy Microsoft's Microsoft Agent 365, Salesforce Agentforce, Google's Gemini Enterprise and Glean's Agents platform. The announcement also comes soon after rival Anthropic released Cowork in research preview, an AI agent built specifically to handle files, draft documents and automate tasks.

The move once again raises the question of whether AI agents can replace traditional enterprise software, flipping the delivery from Software as a Service to Service as Software as analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe theorized. It also raises the question of what form managing AI "coworkers" should take. Lattice opened the conversation in August 2024 with its announcement that it would treat onboarding of AI agents in a comparable way to humans, a position it quickly retracted after pushback.    

OpenAI Accelerated Its Enterprise Push in 2025

OpenAI expanded its enterprise product portfolio throughout 2025, adding role-based access control, project sharing capabilities and connectors for workplace applications. The company unveiled Connectors in June, native integrations enabling ChatGPT to connect with Gmail, Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and GitHub. By October, OpenAI entered the enterprise intelligence space with GPT-5-powered "company knowledge," and reported 3 million paying business users.

Strategic partnerships evolved significantly, with OpenAI and ServiceNow expanding their collaboration in January 2026 through a three-year agreement integrating GPT-5.2 into ServiceNow's AI platform.

Frontier is just the latest move by a company that appears to be taking a throw the spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks approach to building a sustainable revenue growth model. Although the company names State Farm, Uber, Oracle and HP as early adopters, the question remains if it can convince risk-averse enterprise IT departments to trust its security and governance posture.

Frontier is available now to a limited number of partners and broader availability is expected in the next few months.

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