While OpenAI has cutting-edge technology and significant organizational capacity, it remains less established in enterprise environments compared to long-standing incumbents. “A lot of these applications and data management systems — especially from the hyperscalers — have been in place in organizations for years. They’re a known entity, a known quantity,” he said. “OpenAI has to ensure it can communicate and position itself not as just a cool new AI capability that’s growing exponentially in terms of its reasoning capabilities.”
With the launch of Frontier, OpenAI will be competing with enterprise software vendors that also want to position themselves as the orchestration layer for AI agents. Microsoft, for instance, last year announced its Agent 365 platform; it has some overlapping functionality with Frontier, focusing on agent governance and security, in particular, as well as multiple agent builder tools. Google, which has spent years pushing into the enterprise, also sells various products to build and manage agents. Both benefit from tight integration with their application suites, said Law.
Few large organizations have yet adopted agents at scale, but well-established vendors could start with an advantage if businesses begin to invest more. When enterprise organizations evaluate large language models (LLMs) and agentic platforms, their “first preferred choice of provider is, in fact, the hyperscalers,” said Law.
