Managers need to understand how their subordinates get work done, what resources they require, and what they accomplish. OpenAI’s latest product aims to fulfill this need when the teammates are AI agents.
What’s new: OpenAI announced Frontier, a platform designed to help orchestrate corporate cadres of agents, including building them, sharing information and business context among them, evaluating their performance, and managing their interactions with employees and each other. Cisco and T-Mobile have used the system in pilot projects, and OpenAI is offering it, along with dedicated engineering help, to selected clients including HP, Intuit, and Uber. It plans to make Frontier more widely available in coming months under terms that are not yet disclosed.
How it works: Frontier provides a unified user interface for managing agents regardless of the frameworks and models involved. Administrators can build or import agents, provide access to them, integrate data sources and applications, and manage billing, among other functions. OpenAI revealed little information about the system but shared some key points:
- Each agent has its own identity, permissions, and guardrails, and companies can control which employees or groups can use it.
- Agents can share context including access to data, tools, applications, and information about relevant systems and workflows.
- Frontier evaluates agents’ outputs and provides feedback to improve their performance. Based on promotional illustrations, it appears that users can set evaluation metrics based on ground-truth data, such as accuracy, or model output, for example, using a large language model to measure politeness.
- Agents can “build memories, turning past interactions into useful context,” which implies that agents can improve their performance automatically over time by recalling successful responses to earlier prompts.
Behind the news: Frontier arrives a few months after Microsoft released Agent 365, a similar platform that integrates with Microsoft applications like Word and Excel. Agent 365 focuses more tightly on security and governance, while Frontier offers more features for building, evaluating, and improving agents.
Why it matters: As a company puts more agents to work, the ability to manage them en masse becomes more valuable. For instance, an agent deployed by one group within a company may have broader utility, or agents deployed by disparate groups may duplicate functions or work at cross purposes. A unified control interface may make such opportunities and issues more apparent. The agent-management systems from OpenAI and Microsoft aim to enable teams to manage these activities from a higher level.
We’re thinking: Conceptually, a “human resources” system for agents makes sense. Such systems are in their infancy — as suggested by OpenAI’s limited rollout and provision of engineering help — but they have clear utility that’s likely to grow as companies put more agents to work on their behalf.