OpenAI’s Frontier puts AI agents in a fight SaaS can’t afford to lose

When OpenAI launched Frontier in February, the announcement was described as a platform for enterprise AI agents. What it truly signalled was a problem to the income structure underpinning the software program trade.

Frontier is designed to behave as a semantic layer in an organisation’s current techniques, connecting information warehouses, CRM platforms, ticketing instruments, and inside functions so AI agents can function with the identical enterprise context a human worker would have. OpenAI describes these agents as “AI coworkers” that may be on-boarded, assigned identities, granted permissions, and reviewed for efficiency.

Early prospects embody Uber, State Farm, Intuit, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has acknowledged that enterprise prospects at present account for roughly 40% of the corporate’s income, and she or he goals to extend this determine to nearer to 50% by year-end, and claims Frontier is the car.

Frontier in enterprise workflows

The case for Frontier is that agents deployed in isolation add complexity not take away it. Each new agent is a level of integration, requiring its personal information connections and governance controls, and the result’s fragmentation. OpenAI’s reply is a shared enterprise context. Rather than every agent constructing its personal understanding of how an organisation works, Frontier offers a centralised layer that each one agents can reference.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, talking on the launch briefing, referred to her time working Instacart. “We spent months integrating every of those that we chosen. We didn’t even get what we truly wished, as a result of every software was good for one use case, however they weren’t built-in or speaking to at least one one other, so we have been simply reinforcing silos on silos.”

The outcomes OpenAI cites from early deployments embody a international funding agency utilizing Frontier agents in its gross sales course of liberating up greater than 90% of salesperson time beforehand spent on administrative duties. A know-how buyer reported saving 1,500 hours a month in product growth. At a main producer, agents compressed a manufacturing optimisation course of from six weeks to a single day.

Frontier manages agents constructed by OpenAI, in-house enterprise groups, and people from third-party suppliers. Openness is a design precept and positioning: it makes Frontier tougher to dismiss on the grounds of vendor lock-in and expands the floor space it may possibly govern.

The seat-licence downside

A deep concern for incumbents is structural. The per-seat licence mannequin that has made SaaS enormously worthwhile assumes that software program use maps to headcount. If an AI agent handles the workflow that beforehand required a human worker logging into Salesforce, the justification for that seat licence weakens. Fortune described worry in the market of fashions like Frontier making SaaS software program “invisible” and consequently much less helpful.

Salesforce’s inventory has declined greater than 27% this yr, which analysts have attributed extra to agentic AI disruption fears than to any weak spot in its underlying financials. Revenue reached $11.2 billion in the quarter, Agentforce’s annual recurring income hit $800 million, and the corporate closed 29,000 Agentforce offers. Stock fell after steerage that got here in beneath Wall Street’s expectations.

The incumbents usually are not standing nonetheless. Salesforce has launched what it calls the Agentic Enterprise License Agreement, a fixed-price, all-you-can-eat mannequin for Agentforce that makes an attempt to make consumption extra predictable for enterprise patrons.

ServiceNow has moved to consumption-based pricing for a few of its AI agent choices, and in January signed a multiyear settlement with OpenAI to embed frontier mannequin skills immediately into its platform. Microsoft has launched consumption-based pricing with its per-user mannequin for Copilot Studio.

The pricing pivot indicators that firms perceive the seat-licence mannequin can not survive agentic AI unchanged. The query is whether or not repricing is sufficient or whether or not the structure itself wants to alter.

Two concepts of the place the intelligence layer ought to sit

Should AI agents stay inside techniques of document, or above them? Salesforce and ServiceNow are betting on the embedded mannequin, arguing that agents are handiest once they sit closest to the information, and that CIOs will belief governance and compliance controls extra readily from distributors already managing their workflows.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has described Agentforce because the “working system for the agentic enterprise.” ServiceNow positions its AI Control Tower as a centralised governance layer for all agents, no matter origin.

OpenAI, and to a comparable diploma, Anthropic with Claude Cowork, is betting on the overlay mannequin. Frontier sits above current techniques, utilizing open requirements to attach them. The pitch is that enterprises mustn’t should re-platform to get production-grade agents working in their operations.

Both arguments have benefit, and enterprises evaluating these platforms will discover real trade-offs. The embedded strategy gives tighter information management and sooner time to worth in a identified ecosystem. The overlay strategy gives flexibility and avoids the issue of agents that may solely see one vendor’s information.

What the incumbents have that OpenAI doesn’t is a long time of institutional belief and current contracts. What the AI chief has is the mannequin skill benefit and an argument that it may possibly run the intelligence layer throughout the entire enterprise.

Frontier is at present accessible to a restricted set of shoppers, with broader availability anticipated over the approaching months. Pricing has not been disclosed, with OpenAI directing organisations to its enterprise gross sales workforce.

Many giant enterprises run Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft infrastructure concurrently. The instant query is whether or not Frontier turns into an orchestration layer that connects techniques, or a platform that displaces them.

OpenAI’s chief income officer, Denise Dresser, mentioned: “What’s actually lacking nonetheless for many firms is simply a easy solution to free the facility of agents as teammates that may function contained in the enterprise with out the necessity to rework every part beneath.”

Every platform in this house claims to shut the hole. SaaS incumbents have a head begin on belief and information. Whether that proves enough is the central query for enterprise software program via to the top of 2026.

(Photo by Austin Distel)

See additionally: OpenAI’s enterprise push: The hidden story behind AI’s sales race

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