OpenAI launches Frontier, a platform for building and operating enterprise AI agents, as companies increasingly question whether to commit to single-vendor systems or maintain multi-model flexibility.
The platform provides integrated tools for agent execution, evaluation, and governance in one place. But Frontier also reflects OpenAI’s push into enterprise AI at a time when organizations are actively moving toward multi-vendor architectures — creating a tension between OpenAI’s centralized approach and what enterprises say they want.
Tatyana Mamut, CEO of agent observability company Wayfound, told VentureBeat that enterprises don’t want to be locked into a single vendor or platform as AI strategies are constantly evolving.
Mamut said, “They are not ready to fully commit. Everyone I talk to knows that eventually they will move toward a one-size-fits-all solution, but right now, things are moving so fast that we can’t commit.” “That’s why most AI contracts aren’t traditional SaaS contracts; no one is signing multi-year contracts anymore because if something good comes along next month, I need to be able to pivot, and I can’t be locked into that.”
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 launched Bedrock AgentCore with the idea that there would be enterprise customers who don’t want to assemble a comprehensive collection of tools and platforms for their agentic AI projects.
However, AWS offers one important benefit: access to multiple LLMs for building agents. Enterprises may choose a hybrid system in which an agent selects the best LLM for each task. OpenAI has not clarified whether it will open Frontiers to models and tools from other vendors.
OpenAI did not say whether Frontier users could bring any third-party tools they already use to the platform, and it did not comment on why it chose to release Frontier now when enterprises 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 single platform that provides access to various enterprise-grade tools from OpenAI. The Frontier Agents SDK will not replace offerings like AgentKit or its API suite, the company told VentureBeat.
OpenAI said Frontier helps bring context, agent execution and evaluation onto a single platform instead of 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 limits. This is how teams move beyond individual use cases to AI co-workers who work across the business,” OpenAI said 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 commons permissions and retrieval logic for agents built on the platform to pull information. Frontier has an agent execution environment that can run on local environments, cloud infrastructure, or “OpenAI-hosted runtimes without forcing teams to think about how work is done.”
Built-in evaluation structures, security and governance dashboards allow teams to monitor agent behavior and performance. These provide organizations with visibility into the success rates, accuracy, and latency of their agents. OpenAI said Frontier has added its own enterprise-grade data protection layer, including the option for companies to choose where to store their data.
Frontier launched with a small group of early customers, including HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber.
Security and governance concerns
Frontier is available only to select customers with wider availability coming soon. Enterprise providers are already considering what the platform needs to address.
Ellen Boehm, senior vice president of IoT and AI identity innovation at KeyFactor, told VentureBeat that companies will still need to focus their agents on security and identity.
“Agent platforms like OpenAI’s Frontier Model are critical to democratizing the adoption of AI beyond the enterprise," He said. "This levels the playing field – startups get enterprise-grade capabilities without enterprise-level infrastructure, which means more innovation and healthy competition across the marketplace. But accessible doesn’t mean you have to skip the basics."
Madhav Thattai, executive vice president and GM of Salesforce AI, who is overseeing the agent builder and library platform at his company, said that no matter the platform, enterprises need to focus on the value they provide to agents.
“What we’re finding is that building an agent that actually does something at scale that creates real ROI is quite challenging," Thattai said. "The real business value for enterprises isn’t just in the AI models – it’s in the ‘last mile’."
"It is the software layer that transforms raw technology into reliable, autonomous execution. To overcome this last mile, agents must be able to reason through complexity and operate on reliable business data, which is what we are focusing on.
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