OpenAI introduces the Frontier platform, which allows companies to build, deploy, and manage AI agents. It aims to offer an end-to-end approach to building agents and getting them to actually work within existing systems. OpenAI bases its approach on how companies have been onboarding people for years: with shared context, training, feedback, and clear access rights.
Frontier is based on four core principles. First, an agent must understand how work actually happens within systems. To this end, the platform connects siloed data warehouses, CRM systems, ticketing tools, and internal applications into a single semantic layer accessible to all agents.
Second, agents must be able to plan, act, and solve problems. The platform offers an open agent execution environment in which agents can work with files, run code, and use tools. In doing so, they build up memory from previous interactions, which improves performance.
Third, quality improvement is crucial. Built-in evaluation and optimization make it clear what works and what doesn’t. This way, agents learn what good work is and become better at tasks that matter. Fourth, each agent has its own identity with explicit permissions and guardrails, so teams can deploy them in sensitive and regulated environments.
OpenAI provides Frontier engineers who work with customer teams on implementation and best practices. They also form a feedback loop to OpenAI Research, so that learnings from business implementations improve the models themselves.
Approach
OpenAI emphasizes that Frontier works with existing systems without requiring companies to replatform. Agents can run on local environments, enterprise cloud infrastructure, and OpenAI-hosted runtimes. For time-sensitive work, Frontier prioritizes low-latency access to OpenAI models.
The approach aims to shift the perspective from isolated use cases to AI coworkers working throughout the organization. The starting point is that agents need the same skills as humans. That is, context, onboarding, feedback, and boundaries.
Tip: OpenAI introduces no-code agent builder AgentKit and Apps in ChatGPT