OpenAI Enters a New Frontier: Trying to Make Money

For a while, OpenAI was considered to have the best frontier AI model in the business. Now that it has seemingly been surpassed in some key categories by competitors like Google and Anthropic, it’s settling for just launching a product called Frontier instead. On Thursday, the company announced a new enterprise platform that will seek to attract business customers by offering a dedicated space to build, deploy, and manage AI agents.

According to OpenAI, Frontier is meant to be a platform that connects different parts of the enterprise platform, working across the corporate ecosystem to complete assigned tasks autonomously without upending their existing operations. That is to say, if a company is already running Salesforce’s Customer Relationship Management tools, Frontier allows businesses to configure their agents to work with that rather than needing OpenAI to build its own CRM offering.

“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. That’s how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers that work across the business,†the company said. It’s also claiming a long list of early adopters to Frontier, including HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, and Uber.

OpenAI is positioning the launch of Frontier as an attempt to close the “opportunity gap†between the massive amount of data available within a company’s existing stack and the ability to use AI to do something with all of that information. But more than that, it’s an attempt at closing the “opportunity gap†between OpenAI and generating revenue. Currently, the company reportedly boasts more than 900 million monthly active users, but only 5% of those reportedly pay for the service.

The only place the company really shows meaningful potential for revenue is with enterprise customers, who account for about 40% of OpenAI’s revenue. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said during an appearance at Davos that they expect that to push up to 50% by the end of this year. The company also has a lot of room to grow there, as it holds just 27% of the total market, according to a recent report from Menlo Ventures. Unfortunately for them, that’s because they have gotten squeezed by competitors. In the last two years, Anthropic has skyrocketed to the top spot in enterprise AI offerings thanks to its powerful coding model, and in the last year, Google has nearly doubled its share of the market with the release of Gemini 3.

Frontier is OpenAI’s attempt to get back in the driver’s seat. If it doesn’t work, the company may be closer to being on the edge of oblivion than anything.