OpenAI Launches ‘Frontier’ to Help Enterprises Build and Manage AI Agents as Digital Co-Workers
OpenAI has launched Frontier, a new enterprise platform aimed at helping organisations build, deploy and manage AI agents that can perform real, ongoing work across business operations. The move signals a shift from experimental AI pilots to full-scale production use, with OpenAI positioning these agents as “AI co-workers” rather than standalone tools.
According to the company, Frontier is designed to allow businesses to onboard AI agents much like employees, give them context and defined roles, and govern their actions through enterprise-grade controls. The platform supports deployment across local infrastructure, enterprise cloud environments and OpenAI-hosted runtimes, while prioritising low-latency access to OpenAI’s latest models.
OpenAI said Frontier is built on open standards, enabling internal software teams and third-party developers to integrate agents directly into existing enterprise workflows without major re-engineering.
At the core of Frontier is a unified system for managing multiple AI agents. The platform provides shared business context by connecting agents to systems of record such as data warehouses, customer relationship management tools and internal applications, allowing them to develop durable institutional memory. Agents can reason over data, work with files, run code and coordinate with other agents in parallel within a controlled execution environment.
The platform also includes built-in evaluation and optimisation tools that monitor agent performance over time and use feedback loops to improve outcomes on real business tasks. OpenAI said this approach helps enterprises understand what is working, what is not, and how agents can be refined safely in production.
Security and governance are central to the design. Frontier supports enterprise identity and access management for agent identities, provides auditable action logs, and complies with standards such as SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701. Once AI labels or permissions are applied, they are designed to remain intact across environments.
OpenAI said early adopters of the Frontier approach include HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Uber. Existing customers such as BBVA, Cisco, and T-Mobile have already piloted parts of the model.
To support deployments, OpenAI is also working with a small group of Frontier Partners, including Abridge, Clay, Ambience, Decagon, Harvey, and Sierra, to co-design solutions and support enterprise rollouts.
OpenAI describes Frontier as a response to what it calls “agent sprawl” — the fragmentation that occurs when different teams deploy isolated AI agents without shared data, controls or oversight. Frontier is positioned as a single control layer that can manage agents from OpenAI as well as third parties, allowing them to move across local, cloud and OpenAI-hosted environments without forcing organisations to rewrite processes.
The company also highlighted results from early enterprise deployments over recent years. At a major semiconductor manufacturer, AI agents reportedly reduced chip optimisation timelines from six weeks to one day. A global investment firm deployed agents across sales processes, freeing up more than 90 per cent additional time for sales teams. In the energy sector, an enterprise recorded up to a five per cent increase in output, which OpenAI said translated into more than a billion dollars in additional revenue.
State Farm’s digital leader Joe Park said combining Frontier with OpenAI’s deployment expertise alongside employees is helping the insurer accelerate its AI capabilities to improve customer service.
OpenAI said Frontier is currently available to a limited set of customers, with broader enterprise availability expected in the coming months.
Our Thoughts
The launch of Frontier marks a clear shift in how AI is being positioned inside large organisations — not as experimental software, but as governed digital labour. By focusing on shared context, security, and lifecycle management, OpenAI is addressing the real barriers enterprises face when scaling AI beyond pilots. The success of Frontier will ultimately depend on whether organisations can integrate AI agents without eroding accountability or overwhelming workers, but the move signals that the era of AI as a background assistant is giving way to AI as an active participant in daily business operations.
