OpenAI’s Frontier empowers AI agents with essential human skills, enabling them to function as AI coworkers across organizations, thereby narrowing the AI adoption divide. Industry experts are highly favorable.
Following Anthropic’s recent introduction of 11 open-source plugins for Claude Cowork, which facilitate automated workflows in sectors like customer support and IT operations, OpenAI introduced its analogous platform, Frontier, on Thursday.
The company declared its new offering “equips agents with essential workplace competencies: shared understanding, guided onboarding, practical learning reinforced by feedback, and explicit permissions and operational limits. This approach enables teams to transcend siloed applications, fostering AI coworkers integrated throughout the enterprise.”
Frontier seamlessly integrates with current systems, as the announcement detailed, enabling clients to connect their applications via open standards, thus eliminating the necessity for costly replatforming. These novel AI coworkers are accessible through “any interface, ensuring they aren’t confined to a specific user interface or application.”
Furthermore, several current clients such as Cisco, T-Mobile, and the Argentine financial institution BBVA are actively piloting Frontier, while HP, Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber have embraced it as early adopters.
Frontier: A Natural Evolution
Jason Andersen, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, indicated that the industry’s excitement about Anthropic and OpenAI venturing into this arena was entirely predictable, commenting that “they have already demonstrated their disruptive potential and are now directly targeting the SaaS and enterprise productivity markets.”
The challenge, Andersen noted, is that many incumbent platforms targeted by these AI specialists already incorporate similar agent-based technologies. Consequently, customers are already familiar with such toolsets within products like Microsoft Office, SAP, and Slack, which also provide integration and ready-to-use agents. He questioned what unique value OpenAI and Anthropic could bring to unseat established players with comparable offerings.
He highlighted that the crucial question for all these incumbents and AI vendors, aspiring to remain pertinent, is how they will move beyond mere augmentation to strategically leverage agents, thereby transforming the overall customer value proposition.
Thomas Randall, a research director at Info-Tech Research Group, confirmed OpenAI’s continued standing as the leading model provider for enterprise AI implementations. He views Frontier as the natural progression to guarantee its models seamlessly integrate across diverse enterprise tools and management systems.
However, Randall highlighted, “this particular move doesn’t represent market leadership, and OpenAI appears to be losing some of its initial advantage.” He mentioned that OpenAI’s competitors, like Anthropic, have been considerably more aggressive in implementing agentic automation throughout business workflows, with Anthropic’s Claude gaining significant popularity among developers.
“In addition,” he commented, “prominent SaaS platforms impacting numerous departments within an organization, such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, are also integrating their [own] AI agents throughout these interconnected workflows – spanning functions from supply chain to sales.”
He observed, “the key inquiry for businesses will be: which provider will establish itself as your standard orchestration platform for AI workflows? Will OpenAI take this role? Or, perhaps more probable, will it be a platform such as ServiceNow, which, while potentially using OpenAI models, already underpins a significant portion of the enterprise technology stack?”
According to Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, OpenAI’s Frontier AI platform signals a stronger commitment to enterprise clients. He remarked, “The vendor seeks to extend its reach beyond foundational models and ChatGPT, evolving into a platform for designing, orchestrating, and governing AI and agents.” He added that the immediate advantage for AI leaders would be a faster return on investment for organizations already utilizing OpenAI’s products. However, he cautioned, “this hinges on OpenAI delivering a unified AI platform with strong governance capabilities and deep integration into enterprise workflows.”
He further warned that placing a significant platform bet on OpenAI carries inherent risks. These include an over-reliance on a sole strategic supplier in the rapidly evolving AI landscape, and considerable upfront capital expenditure with an unpredictable return on investment.
Complementary Roles for AI Platforms in the Enterprise
Nevertheless, Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, believes there’s a distinct role for both OpenAI Frontier and Claude Cowork in the enterprise, stating: “These aren’t simply different versions of the same concept. They are fundamentally distinct products addressing entirely different problems within an organization.”
Gogia clarified that Frontier “is entirely centered on orchestration. Consider it the control layer, the essential connective tissue that renders a collection of AI agents functional, governable, and crucially, reliable. It provides these agents with essential structure; they are not mere tools, but each agent has an identity, a purpose, defined permissions, and memory. Everything is recorded, evaluated, and managed. This is how organizations scale from initial pilots to full production.”
Gogia noted that Claude Cowork “is distinct. It’s an ‘executor.’ It’s local, swift, and independent. It performs like a highly skilled junior team member, capable of managing complete tasks when outfitted with the correct plugins. These plugins grant it specialized intelligence for specific roles. … However, Cowork functions in isolation. Each instance runs independently; there’s no shared status, no unified policy, and no awareness across agents. This is acceptable for small deployments but quickly becomes unmanageable when attempting to deploy 20 or 50 instances across an organization.”
Thus, he concluded, these two platforms are not competing but rather complementary. “Cowork manages automation at the task level. Frontier, meanwhile, handles coordination, governance, and scaling. … The genuine strength emerges from deploying them in conjunction.”
He described Frontier as a clear sign of significant evolution in enterprise AI, stating: “[It] signifies OpenAI’s firm establishment within the enterprise infrastructure domain. It’s designed as a platform for operating and managing AI throughout your business, much like how one manages conventional applications or services.”
Gogia stated that this platform “resolves a significant hurdle we’ve tracked for the past year. Enterprises are not struggling with AI models; their challenge lies in deploying agents reliably, securely, and consistently. Nearly every organization has an AI pilot, but few can confirm those agents are truly integrated into core business functions. This is the ‘velocity gap’ – and Frontier is designed to eliminate it.”
