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OpenAI asks its friends to tell their friends about Frontier

Agent-making tool that mimics human workers is about to get its enterprise close up.

OpenAI has managed to make a name for itself with ChatGPT. But if it wants its new enterprise AI product Frontier to succeed, it's going to need help. According to an analyst, the company is smart to partner with the world's biggest consultants to push Frontier, which can create and control role-based AI agents throughout an organization.

“For OpenAI to do this alone without the help of consulting firms would be a hard and a time-consuming process,” Forrester senior analyst Akshara Naik Lopez told The Register. “So I think it was the right call to scale the adoption of their Frontier platform globally for large businesses. Additionally, a lot of these firms bring other best practices and expertise in areas such as cybersecurity services, data services, sovereignty setup services etc. These will also be increasingly needed if Frontier is to gain high adoption numbers.”

OpenAI says Frontier – which was released earlier this month – builds, deploys, and manages AI agents that can do real work.

“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,” OpenAI wrote on Feb. 5. “That’s how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers that work across the business.”

Among the first to try it were HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, and Uber, while Cisco and T-Mobile are piloting Frontier.

Now, OpenAI has joined up with Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, and McKinsey in a partnership called Frontier Alliance to sell and install the new agent platform.

Each one of the partners will create a dedicated team that will be certified on OpenAI technology, according to the GPT-maker's statement. OpenAI will support them with technical resources, roadmap insight, and access to its product and research teams.

Naik Lopez said each of the four partners has a deep bench for strategy, consulting, technology integration, and product rollout which is what OpenAI needs if it is going to be successful in selling Frontier to enterprise customers.

“To get adoption and traction of this platform with large scale enterprises globally, [OpenAI] cannot do this alone," Naik Lopez said. “This is where these consultancies come in. They understand these organizations, their processes, their complex operations, the competencies and skills needed within the labor force to run these organizations. So these consultancies are in the right spot to help large organization mobilize usage of platform such as Frontier.”

Naik Lopez said that, while AI coworkers have been talked about “conceptually,” few have delivered for large business. That is also pressuring OpenAI to find more friends in the enterprise to steer its product to a soft landing.

“What drives enterprise adoption is not just the ability to build an AI agent. Without a proper structure to bring in all the process context, skills, competencies from various applications, ability to handle agent security and governance, ability to measure its performance – it is just an agent,” Naik Lopez said. “All these are crucial for it to be ‘enterprise ready.’ No tech leader worth their weight will let an AI agent orchestrate and execute across multiple systems, without proper ability to manage and govern it and measure its performance and improve it over time to drive efficiency.”

She expects to see more partners beyond the first four systems integrators and consultants if OpenAI hopes to scale it to enterprise customers worldwide.

“I would not be surprised if, in the future, these partners will become resellers of Frontier platforms – but that is looking way out in the future,” Naik Lopez said. “Essentially it would act very similar to how traditional mega-vendors like Oracle and SAP scale globally – they don’t do it alone. Their success has been due to a very heavy partner-driven ecosystem. That is what drives scale globally.”

OpenAI could use a win. Anthropic’s Claude Code has won headlines and raving plaudits for its prompt-driven coding efficacy. The House of Altman has answered back with its own coding model, Codex, but has also started testing advertisements on its free models. That comes even as it faces pressure from larger competitors like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft which, after backing OpenAI for years, is now working on its own large language models.

Since mid-January, OpenAI has also been in the midst of a massive fundraising campaign that has valued the company as high as $850 billion as it is seeks $100 billion in investments to fuel the buildout of the massive infrasructure required to deliver AI products at scale. It has won early buy-in from Amazon, Nvidia, Softbank and Microsoft, according to Bloomberg. ®