OpenAI launched Frontier, a platform for building and governing enterprise AI agents, as companies increasingly question whether to commit to single-vendor systems or maintain multi-model flexibility.
The platform offers integrated tools for agent execution, evaluation, and governance in one place. But Frontier also reflects OpenAI's push into enterprise AI at a moment when organizations are actively moving toward multi-vendor architectures — creating tension between OpenAI's centralized approach and what enterprises say they want.
Tatyana Mamut, CEO of the agent observability company Wayfound, told VentureBeat that enterprises don’t want to be locked into a single vendor or platform because AI strategies are ever-evolving.Â
“They’re not ready to fully commit. Everybody I talk to knows that eventually they’ll move to a one-size-fits-all solution, but right now, things are moving too fast for us to commit,” Mamut said. “This is the reason why most AI contracts are not traditional SaaS contracts; nobody is signing multi-year contracts anymore because if something great comes out next month, I need to be able to pivot, and I can’t be 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 launched Bedrock AgentCore with the idea that there will be enterprise customers who don’t want to assemble an extensive collection of tools and platforms for their agentic AI projects.Â
However, AWS offers a significant advantage: access to multiple LLMs for building agents. Enterprises can choose a hybrid system in which an agent selects the best LLM for each task. OpenAI has not made it clear if it will open Frontier to models and tools from other vendors.
OpenAI did not say whether Frontier users can 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 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.Â
What is Frontier
Frontier is a single platform that offers access to different enterprise-grade tools from OpenAI. The company told VentureBeat that Frontier will not replace offerings such as the Agents SDK, AgentKit, or its suite of APIs.Â
OpenAI said Frontier helps bring context, agent execution, and evaluation into 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 co-workers that 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 normalizes permissions and retrieval logic for agents built on the platform to pull information from. Frontier has an agent executive environment, which can run on local environments, cloud infrastructures, or “OpenAI-hosted runtimes without forcing teams to reinvent how work gets done.”
Built-in evaluation structures, security, and governance dashboards allow teams to monitor agent behavior and performance. These give organizations visibility into their agents' success rates, accuracy, and latency. OpenAI said Frontier incorporates its enterprise-grade data security layer, including the option for companies to choose where to store 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 governance concerns
Frontier is available only to a select group of customers with wider availability coming soon. Enterprise providers are already weighing what the platform needs to address.
Ellen Boehm, senior vice president for IoT and AI Identity Innovation at Keyfactor, told VentureBeat that companies will still need to focus their agents on security and identity.Â
“Agent platforms like OpenAI's Frontier model are critical for democratizing AI adoption beyond the enterprise," she said. "This levels the playing field — startups get enterprise-grade capabilities without enterprise-scale infrastructure, which means more innovation and healthier competition across the market. But accessible doesn't mean you skip the fundamentals."Â
Salesforce AI executive vice president and GM Madhav Thattai, who is overseeing an agent builder and library platform at his company, noted that no matter the platform, enterprises need to focus agents on value.
“What we’re finding is that to build an agent that actually does something at scale that creates real ROI is pretty challenging," Thattai said. "The true business value for enterprises doesn’t reside in the AI model alone — it’s in the 'last mile.'"
"That is the software layer that translates raw technology into trusted, autonomous execution. To traverse this last mile, agents must be able to reason through complexity and operate on trusted business data, which is exactly where we are focusing.”Â
