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OpenAI launches Frontier, a platform for building and managing enterprise AI agents, as companies increasingly question whether to commit to a single vendor’s systems or pursue the flexibility of multiple models.
The platform offers integrated tools for agent implementation, evaluation, and management in one place. But Frontier also showcases OpenAI’s push into enterprise AI at a time when organizations are actively moving toward multi-vendor architectures — creating tension between OpenAI’s centralized approach and what businesses say they want.
Tatyana Mamut, CEO of agent observability company Wayfound, told VentureBeat that businesses don’t want to be locked into one vendor or platform because AI strategies are constantly evolving.
“They are not yet ready to fully commit. Everyone I spoke to knows that eventually they will move to a scale suitable for all solutions, but for now, things are going so fast that we can do it,” said Mamut. “This is why most AI contracts are not traditional SaaS contracts; no one is signing multi-year contracts anymore because if something good comes out next month, I need to be able to pivot, and I’m not locked in.
How Frontier compares to AWS Bedrock
OpenAI is not the first to offer an end-to-end platform for building, prototyping, testing, deploying, and monitoring agents. AWS launches Bedrock AgentCore with the idea that there are enterprise customers who do not want to assemble a wide collection of tools and platforms for their agent AI projects.
However, AWS offers a significant advantage: access to more LLMs for construction agents. Businesses can choose a hybrid system where the agent selects the best LLM for each task. OpenAI has not clarified whether it will open Frontier to models and tools from other vendors.
OpenAI didn’t say whether Frontier users would be able to bring any third-party tools they already use to the platform, and it didn’t comment on why it chose to release Frontier now when businesses are considering more hybrid systems.
But the company is working with companies including Clay, Abridge, Harvey, Decagon, Ambience, and Sierra to design solutions within Frontier.
What is Frontier
Frontier is a platform that offers access to a variety of enterprise-level tools from OpenAI. The company told VentureBeat that Frontier will not take over offerings such as the Agent SDK, AgentKitor its suite of APIs.
OpenAI said Frontier can help bring context, agent execution, and evaluation to a single platform rather than multiple systems and tools.
“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. That’s how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers working across the enterprise,” said OpenAI in a blog post.
Users can connect their data sources, CRM tools, and other internal applications directly to Frontier, effectively creating a semantic layer that normalizes permissions and retrieval logic for agents built into the platform to retrieve information. Frontier has an agent-based executive environment, which can run on-premise environments, cloud infrastructures, or “openAI-hosted runtimes without forcing teams to change how they work.”
Built-in evaluation structures, security, and management dashboards allow teams to monitor agent behavior and performance. It gives organizations visibility into the success rates, accuracy, and latency of their agents. OpenAI says Frontier includes enterprise-grade data security, including an option for companies to choose where to put their data at rest.
Frontier launched with a small group of initial customers, including HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber.
Security and management concerns
Frontier is only available to a select group of customers with wider availability coming soon. Business providers are already evaluating what the platform will have to deal with.
Ellen Boehm, senior vice president for IoT and AI Identity Innovation at Keyfactor, told VentureBeat that companies still need to focus their agents on security and identity.
“Agent platforms like OpenAI’s Frontier model are critical for democratizing the adoption of AI beyond the enterprise," he said. "This levels the playing field – startups get enterprise-level capabilities without enterprise-scale infrastructure, which means more innovation and healthier competition across the marketplace. But accessible doesn’t mean you skip the basics."
Salesforce AI executive vice president and GM Madhav Thattai, who oversees an agent builder and library platform at his company, noted that regardless of the platform, businesses should focus on value agents.
“What we’ve found is that getting an agent to actually do something that generates real ROI is quite challenging," Thattai said. "The real business value for businesses doesn’t reside in the AI model alone – it’s in the ‘last mile.’"
"That’s the software layer that translates the raw technology into a reliable, autonomous implementation. To traverse this last mile, agents must be able to reason through the complexity and operate on reliable business data, which is exactly what we are focused on.
