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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- OpenAI’s Frontier emulates Palantir’s use of forward-deployed AI engineers.
- Frontier guarantees to additionally deal with agent safety features.
- Like Claude Cowork, Frontier threatens the normal software program business.
OpenAI, which to this point has made most of its cash from client customers of ChatGPT, on Thursday took a web page from Palantir’s playbook, aiming to maneuver deeper into enterprise gross sales. Palantir is arguably essentially the most profitable enterprise AI software program firm, with income of greater than $4 billion yearly from authorities and enterprise shoppers.
OpenAI unveiled Frontier, a framework for deploying enterprise synthetic intelligence brokers; the corporate mentioned the providing will assist firms overcome impediments to deploying brokers inside organizations.
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“We’re introducing Frontier, a new platform that helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can do real work,” mentioned OpenAI in its press launch. The framework, it mentioned, “gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries.”
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s mum or dad firm, filed an April 2025 lawsuit in opposition to OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI methods.)
Borrowing Palantir’s use of forward-deployed engineers
Whereas particulars are scant, the Frontier method seems to lean closely on “forward-deployed engineers,” groups that work on-site with prospects to tweak the software program to a company’s particular processes and to include what’s realized into ongoing software program growth.
“We pair OpenAI forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) with your teams, working side by side to help you develop the best practices to build and run agents in production,” mentioned OpenAI. “The FDEs also give teams a direct connection to OpenAI Research.” In accordance with OpenAI:
As you deploy brokers, we study not simply the way to enhance your methods across the mannequin. We additionally learn the way the fashions themselves must evolve to be extra helpful to your work. That suggestions loop, from your corporation drawback to deployment to analysis and again, helps either side transfer sooner.
Palantir founder and CEO Alex Karp has featured forward-deployed engineers as a key asset that helps the corporate to combine its software program with prospects’ processes. “The reason you end up with forward-deployed engineers, especially in the beginning, is you have to extend the product,” he mentioned throughout a keynote tackle in September.
The big language mannequin, equivalent to OpenAI’s GPT, mentioned Karp, “is a raw material that has to be processed,” and is commonly “over-hyped” because the savior of companies. It takes engineering to make it actual in deployment, he indicated.
Simply this week, Palantir touted a partnership with Accenture that may “deploy Palantir’s forward-deployed engineers alongside 2,000+ Palantir-skilled Accenture professionals to accelerate AIP [Palantir AI platform] deployment across healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, consumer goods, and financial services.”
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OpenAI’s transfer from being merely an LLM supplier to promoting a platform for agent deployment will likely deliver it into battle with Palantir, C3.ai, and different business software program corporations which have spent years deploying AI with an business focus.
Frontier is at present being utilized by a “limited set of customers,” mentioned OpenAI, together with HP, Inc., Intuit, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, and Uber. It’s going to turn into out there extra broadly “over the next few months,” the corporate mentioned.
Speaking up ontologies and agentic safety
Frontier additionally seems to borrow from Palantir’s method to studying the specifics of industries. Frontier, mentioned OpenAI, will join numerous information sources with what it describes as “a semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI coworkers can reference to operate and communicate effectively.”
That echoes the ontologies that Palantir has promoted as a singular asset, providing a framework for the way AI understands the basic enterprise phrases of an business.
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On the identical time, OpenAI is clearly shifting into the area of cybersecurity and authorization. The Frontier framework identifies and authorizes AI brokers, OpenAI mentioned.
“Frontier makes sure AI coworkers operate within clear boundaries. Each AI coworker has its own identity, with explicit permissions and guardrails. That makes it possible to use them confidently in sensitive and regulated environments.”
Conventional cybersecurity distributors equivalent to Palo Alto Networks have instructed enterprises that they would be the ones to assist determine, authenticate, and grant permissions and place restrictions on AI brokers.
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Threatening conventional software program gross sales
Frontier is each a possibility and a menace for current business software program corporations equivalent to Palantir and Palo Alto Networks. On the one hand, it’s extremely doubtless that OpenAI might want to accomplice with these corporations to shut its personal expertise hole in enterprise gross sales. That might require OpenAI to deliver these distributors into its offers to make up for what Frontier lacks.
However, Frontier is just like one other program that has forged a shadow over conventional software program, the Claude Cowork program from Anthropic. Like Cowork, Frontier might make conventional software program packages much less necessary than giant language fashions, which is able to function the front-end person interface for years to come back.
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By changing the person interface of enterprise, Frontier and Cowork might make each business software program package deal much less necessary as a alternative for enterprise homeowners. That prospect has result in a sell-off in current weeks of software program firm shares, which Bloomberg has labeled the “SaaSpocalypse.”
