OpenAI introduces Frontier, a platform designed so businesses stop tinkering with demos and actually bring AI agents into real work. Can you imagine delegating complex tasks to a digital teammate that understands your systems, learns from experience, and operates with clear permissions? That’s the promise of Frontier.
What problem does it try to solve
AI has stopped being a curiosity: 75% of workers at companies say AI let them do tasks they couldn’t before. But here’s the catch: the issue isn’t just that models are smart. In many organizations, agents end up isolated, lacking context, with ad hoc integrations and scattered governance.
What happens then? Each new agent can add complexity instead of solving it. Companies see a gap between what AI can do and what they can deploy and manage safely and at scale. Sound familiar?
What Frontier offers
Frontier is built to close that gap with an end-to-end approach: build, deploy, and manage agents that do real work. Its key components are:
- Shared context: connects data warehouses, CRM, ticketing and internal apps so agents understand how information flows in your business.
- Access to tools: agents can work with files, run code and use tools in an open, trusted execution environment.
- Learning in production: interaction memory and feedback mechanisms so agents get better over time.
- Identity and permissions: each agent has its own identity, boundaries and guardrails designed for regulated environments.
- Interoperability and low friction: works with the systems and clouds you already use, taking advantage of open standards to avoid replatforming.
- Latency and performance: prioritizes low-latency access to OpenAI models when time is critical.
Concrete examples
Frontier is already in trials and early adoption with large companies. It’s not just theory:
- A manufacturer cut production optimization tasks from six weeks to one day.
- A global investment firm deployed agents in sales and freed over 90% of sales reps’ time to focus on clients.
- A major energy producer increased output by up to 5%, translating into over a billion in additional revenue.
Also, in a hardware debugging case, Frontier helped reduce root-cause identification from roughly four hours per failure to just minutes, saving thousands of engineering hours.
How it works in practice
Frontier acts like a semantic layer that lets agents understand where information lives, how decisions are made, and which outcomes matter. That lets agents not only answer questions but do work:
- They orchestrate data from different systems to make informed decisions.
- They take actions in systems, manipulate files and run analyses or code when needed.
- They build memories of interactions to use historical context in future tasks.
- They include metrics and built-in evaluations so human managers know what’s working and what isn’t.
OpenAI also offers Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who work alongside internal teams to accelerate best practices and feedback between deployment and research.
Security, governance and ecosystem
Frontier emphasizes control and governance: identity per agent, explicit permissions and guardrails designed for sensitive environments. By relying on open standards, it also makes it easier for applications and development teams to integrate agents without long, costly integration projects.
OpenAI already has initial adopters and pilots: HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, Thermo Fisher and Uber are among the early adopters; BBVA, Cisco and T-Mobile have piloted the platform. There are also specialized partners who will build on Frontier.
"By partnering with OpenAI and Frontier, thousands of agents and employees get better tools to serve customers, accelerating AI capabilities and new forms of support," says one company already working with the platform.
What does this mean for your organization?
The question is no longer whether AI will change work — it’s how long it takes you to turn agents into a competitive advantage. Frontier aims to make that transition easier by offering shared context, less painful integrations and enterprise controls.
If your company already has data and applications spread across clouds, the promise is clear: fewer isolated projects and more agents that actually help with day-to-day processes. Frontier is available today to a limited group of customers and will expand access in the coming months.