OpenAI Frontier Just Launched. Here's What Mid-Market Companies Need to Know.

Two enterprise AI agent platforms launched within a week of each other. Anthropic released Cowork Plugins on January 30. OpenAI launched Frontier on February 5.

This is not a coincidence. It is a signal.

The race to own the enterprise AI agent layer is on. And the companies that understand what is happening right now will have a 24-month head start on everyone else.

At QueryNow, we have spent 11 years deploying AI for Fortune 500 companies like Adidas, Bayer, and Rockwell Automation. Here is our take on what Frontier means for your business.

What OpenAI Frontier Actually Is

Frontier is a platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents that OpenAI calls "AI coworkers."

That label matters. OpenAI is not positioning this as a tool. They are positioning it as a workforce layer.

The idea: AI agents should be treated like new employees. You onboard them with institutional knowledge. You give them access to specific systems. You set permissions and boundaries. They learn from feedback and get better over time.

Frontier has four core layers:

• Business Context -- A shared knowledge foundation that connects your data warehouses, CRM, ticketing tools, ERPs, and internal docs. Every AI agent in your organization pulls from the same context. No more isolated chatbots that only know what you paste into them.
• Agent Execution -- The runtime environment where agents do actual work. They can reason over data, work with files, run code, use tools, and execute multi-step workflows. This goes beyond answering questions. These agents complete tasks.
• Evaluation and Optimization -- Built-in tools that measure agent performance against ground truth. You can A/B test agent behavior, track accuracy, detect degradation, and improve quality over time. This is how agents go from demos to dependable teammates.
• Identity and Permissions -- Enterprise-grade security with SSO, role-based access control, agent identity management, content filtering, and compliance controls. Each AI agent has its own identity with explicit boundaries. Critical for regulated industries.

The Numbers That Matter

OpenAI shared specific results from early deployments:

• A major manufacturer reduced production optimization work from 6 weeks to 1 day.
• A global investment company deployed agents across the sales process and freed over 90% more time for salespeople to spend with customers.
• A large energy producer used agents to increase output by 5%, adding over $1 billion in additional revenue.
• Root cause analysis that took engineers 4 hours per failure now takes minutes.

These are not demo results. These are production deployments at scale.

Forward Deployed Engineers -- The Palantir Move

This is the part most people will overlook.

OpenAI is embedding their own engineers directly inside customer organizations. They call them Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). This is the same model Palantir used to become the dominant player in government and defense AI.

FDEs work alongside your team to build agents, customize behavior, and get deployments into production. They also create a direct feedback loop to OpenAI's research team, so your real-world problems inform how the models evolve.

This is a signal that OpenAI is shifting from platform company to solution delivery company. They are not just selling you an API. They are putting skin in the game on your deployment success.

For mid-market companies, the question is whether FDE support will be available beyond the initial Fortune 500 launch partners. Right now, HP, Oracle, State Farm, Uber, Thermo Fisher, and Intuit are the named early adopters. BBVA, Cisco, and T-Mobile have already piloted the platform.

Frontier vs. Cowork -- Two Different Bets

Last week, Anthropic launched Cowork Plugins. This week, OpenAI launched Frontier. Both aim to get AI agents into enterprise production. But the approaches are different.

Anthropic Cowork Plugins takes a bottom-up approach. Individual users install plugins that bundle skills, connectors, and sub-agents for their specific role. Sales gets a sales plugin. Legal gets a legal plugin. It is file-based, easy to customize, and available to all paid Claude users today. The bet: make AI customization so simple that adoption happens organically across teams.

OpenAI Frontier takes a top-down approach. The platform connects to enterprise systems at the infrastructure level, provides shared business context across the organization, and includes professional services for deployment. The bet: enterprise AI needs a platform layer with security, governance, and integration that individual users cannot build themselves.

Both approaches have merit. The right choice depends on where your company is today.

If you are a mid-market company with 200-2,000 employees and lean IT, Cowork Plugins lets you start this week with zero infrastructure investment. Pick a workflow, build a plugin, and test it.

If you are a larger organization with complex systems, regulatory requirements, and the budget for a platform investment, Frontier provides the governance and integration layer that makes AI deployment manageable at scale.

Most companies will end up using both. Different tools for different problems.

What This Means for Mid-Market Companies

Here is the honest truth. Frontier is currently aimed at large enterprises. The FDE model, the launch partner list, and the likely pricing all point to six-figure-plus deployments.

But that does not mean mid-market companies should sit this out.

Three reasons:

First, the technology filters down. What costs $500K to deploy at a Fortune 500 company today will be available as self-service tooling within 12-18 months. The companies that understand the architecture now will deploy faster when it reaches their price point.

Second, Cowork Plugins are available today for every paid Claude user. No enterprise contract required. A mid-market insurance company, law firm, or manufacturer can start building role-specific AI agents this week.

Third, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, and Salesforce Agentforce are all competing for the same space. Competition drives prices down and accessibility up. The mid-market window is opening fast.

The North Star

Twelve months from now, the companies that built their AI agent infrastructure in 2026 will look back and recognize it as the highest-ROI investment they made.

Not because any single agent will replace a department. But because the cumulative effect of 10, 20, 50 AI agents -- each handling a specific workflow, each improving over time, each sharing business context -- changes how a company operates at a fundamental level.

The companies that wait for the "right" platform or the "perfect" use case will find themselves 24 months behind competitors who started imperfect and iterated.

Start now. Start small. Build the muscle.

How QueryNow Can Help

We work across platforms -- Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Copilot, Anthropic Claude, and now the emerging agent frameworks like Cowork and Frontier.

Our approach is platform-agnostic because your business problems are platform-agnostic. We help you:

• Assess which workflows deliver the highest ROI when converted to AI agents. Not every process is a good fit. We help you pick the right ones.
• Build custom agents and plugins using the platform that fits your infrastructure, budget, and security requirements.
• Deploy in 90 days or less. Our methodology has been proven across 11 years and dozens of enterprise clients.
• Train your team to maintain and improve agents after deployment, so you are self-sufficient.

If you want to explore what AI agents could do for your company, reach out for a 30-minute assessment. We will identify your top opportunities and outline a deployment plan.

QueryNow is a Microsoft Solutions Partner and enterprise AI consultancy with 11 years of experience deploying AI for Fortune 500 and mid-market companies. We specialize in 90-day enterprise AI deployments.