In early 2026, the conversation around AI shifted from “What can it write?” to “What can it do?” At the center of this transition is OpenAI Frontier, an enterprise-grade platform launched in February 2026.
If ChatGPT Enterprise was about giving every employee a brainy assistant, Frontier is about giving every department a digital workforce. It is a command center for building, deploying, and managing a fleet of AI agents—or “coworkers”—that don’t just chat, but execute real-world workflows across your entire company stack.
Here is your comprehensive guide to mastering the Frontier dashboard and managing your new AI workforce.
What is OpenAI Frontier?
Unlike the standard API or the ChatGPT interface, Frontier is a multi-agent orchestration platform. It solves the “deployment gap” that many businesses faced in 2025, where AI tools were powerful but isolated.
Frontier introduces four foundational pillars:
- Business Context: A semantic layer that gives agents access to your CRM, data warehouses, and internal docs.
- Agent Execution: A runtime environment where agents can work in parallel on complex, long-horizon tasks.
- Governance & Security: Granular IAM (Identity and Access Management) for every digital agent.
- Performance Optimization: Built-in evaluation loops that treat AI performance reviews as seriously as human ones.
1. Setting Up the “Business Context” Layer
Before you hire a human employee, you give them a laptop and access to the shared drive. In Frontier, this is called the Business Context Layer.
Connecting Your Systems of Record
Inside the Frontier dashboard, navigate to the Integrations tab. Here, you connect the “nervous system” of your company. Frontier is designed to be interface-agnostic and multi-vendor, meaning it can pull data from:
- Data Warehouses: Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks.
- CRMs: Salesforce and HubSpot.
- Communication Hubs: Slack and Microsoft Teams.
- Internal APIs: Custom-built endpoints for proprietary business logic.
Pro Tip: Frontier creates a Semantic Operating System (SOS). Once you connect your data, you don’t need to rebuild the pipeline for every new agent. Every agent you deploy “inherits” this unified understanding of your business terminology and data relationships.
2. Onboarding Your AI Workforce
In the Agent Builder section of the dashboard, you don’t just write prompts; you define Roles. Building an agent is now a visual, “low-code” experience.
Step-by-Step Agent Creation
- Define the Identity: Give your agent a name (e.g., “Revenue Ops Lead”) and a specific scope of work.
- Select the Model: Choose from the GPT-5.2 series based on the task:
- GPT-5.2 “Thinking”: For deep reasoning, strategy, and complex coding.
- GPT-5.2 “Instant”: For high-volume triage and quick responses.
- Assign Tools: Use the Action Layer to give the agent “hands.” You can authorize it to use the Computer Use API, run code in a hosted shell, or trigger webhooks.
- Set Memory: Enable Institutional Memory so the agent remembers past interactions and evolves its strategy over time.
3. Managing Execution: The “Digital Floor”
The Execution Dashboard is where you see your AI workforce in action. Unlike a chat thread, this view looks more like a project management tool (think Jira or Monday.com, but for bots).
Parallel Orchestration
Frontier’s biggest flex is multi-agent coordination. You can set up a “Squad” to handle a strategic project:
- Agent A pulls the quarterly sales pipeline from Salesforce.
- Agent B queries historical revenue from Snowflake.
- Agent C analyzes current market trends via Web Search.
- The Orchestrator synthesizes these into a PDF report and pings your Slack.
You can monitor these “thought traces” in real-time, seeing exactly how the agents are dividing the labor.
4. Governance: The “Agent IAM” System
One of the most significant risks in early 2025 was “over-permissioning”—giving an AI too much access to sensitive data. Frontier solves this with Agent Identity & Access Management (IAM).
Setting Boundaries
In the Security tab, every AI agent is treated as a unique entity with its own credentials.
- Scoped Permissions: You can grant a “Support Agent” read-only access to Zendesk but no access to the Finance folder.
- Human-in-the-Loop (HITL): For high-stakes actions (like moving money or deleting records), you can toggle a “Require Approval” switch. The agent will pause and send a request to a human manager’s dashboard before proceeding.
- Audit Trails: Every single click, query, and output is logged. If an agent hallucinated a data point, you can “rewind” the trace to see exactly where the logic failed.
5. Performance Reviews (Evals)
AI agents don’t stay static. In the Optimization tab, Frontier provides a suite of evaluation tools.
| Feature | Function |
| Trace Grading | Automatically grades agent steps against your “Golden Dataset.” |
| Prompt Optimizer | Suggests tweaks to an agent’s instructions based on failure patterns. |
| Cost Monitor | Tracks token usage per agent, helping you swap expensive models for “mini” versions where appropriate. |
Instead of “vibes-based” testing, you get hard metrics: “The Logistics Agent is 94% accurate on routing but only 70% accurate on customs compliance.” This allows for targeted retraining.
Pricing and How to Get Started
As of February 2026, Frontier is available primarily to Enterprise customers.
- The “Forward Deployed” Model: OpenAI often pairs enterprise teams with their own engineers to help design the initial architecture.
- Token Tiers: Pricing is specialized for the GPT-5 series, with significant discounts for Cached Input (vital for agents that reference the same massive datasets repeatedly).
Your First Project
To get the best ROI, don’t start by automating your whole company. Start with a High-Impact, Well-Defined Use Case:
- Procurement: Agents that cross-reference invoices against contracts.
- Customer Success: Agents that build personalized onboarding plans for new clients.
- Cyber Defense: Using specialized models like GPT-5.3-Codex to hunt for vulnerabilities in your codebase.
The shift to a “Frontier-enabled” organization means moving from using AI to managing AI. By mastering this new dashboard, you aren’t just a manager of people—you’re the architect of a hybrid workforce that works 24/7 at the speed of light.