OpenAI debuts Frontier platform in bid for business bucks • The Register
OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That’s not confusing at all.
The AI biz wants to make it easier for risk-averse organizations to automate workflows with machine learning models, something companies have been loath to do because pilot tests of AI agents often fail to demonstrate meaningful value.
OpenAI’s adoption of the term “frontier” is particularly confusing given that the company started using it to describe AI models in 2023, shortly before it announced the formation of the Frontier Model Forum.
“The Forum defines frontier models as large-scale machine-learning models that exceed the capabilities currently present in the most advanced existing models, and can perform a wide variety of tasks,” the AI biz explained at the time.
Frontier models thus did not exist – being beyond existing models – but were somehow what forum members developed and deployed. The term is essentially code for leading US commercial AI models, as opposed to alternatives.
The company’s Frontier platform is something else entirely. It helps orchestrate AI agents in the way that Kubernetes orchestrates containers.
“Frontier connects siloed data warehouses, CRM systems, ticketing tools, and internal applications to give AI coworkers that same shared business context,” OpenAI explains. “They understand how information flows, where decisions happen, and what outcomes matter. It becomes a semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI coworkers can reference to operate and communicate effectively.”
Context, in the context of AI models, refers to the tokens available to an LLM, meaning the prompt text, the system prompt, and other data including past conversations and interaction history that seed model output. “Business context” then is information from different systems that’s been made available across technical and policy boundaries for AI agents to take action.
OpenAI describes Frontier as enabling “AI coworkers” through an “open agent execution environment.”
“As AI coworkers operate, they build memories, turning past interactions into useful context that improves performance over time,” the company explains, leaning into the conceit that agentic systems can replace employees.
So, Frontier is a (hopefully) safe space to mingle data from sources like Google Calendar, Salesforce, SAP, and business guidance documents so AI agents can complete automated tasks like answering client sales queries.
It sounds simple but clearly isn’t – OpenAI is promising to make Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) available to corporate IT teams to help get agent workflows into production.
Cobus Greyling, chief evangelist at Kore.ai, which also offers an agent platform for enterprises, told The Register in an email that he doubts organizations will find Frontier all that compelling.
“OpenAI Frontier is a name for the frontier of what OpenAI’s tech enables, not a thing you install,” he explained. “It is basically a collective, informal label for using OpenAI’s newest models plus the modern APIs and patterns (Responses API, tool calling, structured outputs, reasoning models, multimodality, agents) together in a loosely coupled, composable way.
“There’s no monolithic ‘Frontier SDK’ or framework; you’re stitching the pieces together yourself, choosing how tightly or loosely agents, tools, memory, and control logic interact.”
Greyling said Frontier is not so much a product as a design philosophy that calls for small, stateless model calls, clear role separation, orchestration in code rather than prompts, and decision-making models rather than a monolithic system making decisions.
What OpenAI is doing, he argues, is similar to what rivals are doing – moving up the AI stack by shifting focus from the models themselves to the applications, tools, orchestration, and standards that define agents.
“This transition commoditizes base models while allowing providers to capture higher value in autonomous agents, enterprise workflows, and interoperability layers,” he said.
And OpenAI has to capture a lot of value to make up for its spending. ®
