OpenAI launches a way for enterprises to build and manage AI agents

OpenAI has launched a new product to help organizations navigate the world of AI agents, focusing on agent management as an important infrastructure for enterprise AI adoption.

AI giant OpenAI on Thursday announced the launch of OpenAI Frontier, a comprehensive platform designed for organizations to build and manage AI agents. It’s an open platform, which means users can manage agents built outside of OpenAI as well.

Frontier users can program AI agents to connect to external data and applications, allowing them to perform tasks outside the scope of the OpenAI platform. Users can also restrict and manage what these agents have access to and of course what they can do.

OpenAI said Frontier is designed to work in the same way businesses manage human employees. Frontier offers an onboarding process for agents and a feedback loop intended to help them improve over time in the same way a review might help an employee.

OpenAI has listed organizations including HP, Oracle, State Farm and Uber as customers, but Frontier is currently only available to a limited number of users with plans to roll out generally in the coming months.

The company did not reveal pricing details at a press conference held earlier this week, The Verge reports. OpenAI declined to comment on pricing.

Agent management products have been on the table since AI agents burst onto the scene in 2024. Salesforce has arguably the most popular product of this type, Agentforce, which the company launched in the fall of 2024. Others quickly followed. LangChain is a prominent player in this space, founded in 2022 and has raised more than $150 million in venture capital. CrewAI is a smaller startup that has raised over $20 million in venture capital.

In December, global research and consulting firm Gartner released a report on this type of software and described agent management platforms as “the most valuable real estate in AI” and a necessary part of the infrastructure for organizations to adopt AI.

It’s no surprise that OpenAI will launch this platform in early 2026, as the company has made it clear that enterprise adoption is one of its key focus areas for the year. The company also announced two notable enterprise deals this year with ServiceNow and Snowflake.

However, if OpenAI wants to be a meaningful player in the enterprise space, offering a product like Frontier is a promising step.