A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon at the Brooklyn Museum for their Monet and Venice exhibit. Looking at his series of paintings, you realize he wasn't just painting buildings; he was painting the atmosphere that connected them.
In the tech world, we’ve just entered our own atmospheric phase. We’ve spent years obsessing over who has the best "brain" (the model), but with the launch of OpenAI Frontier, the battleground has officially moved to the orchestration layer
OpenAI’s Frontier is a classic "out-of-the-box" play. In theory, it solves many of the challenges we face when trying to stitch together disparate protocols (like MCP or A2A). But for those in regulated industries, this convenience comes with a steep price tag: ownership.
When you opt for a polished, third-party product, you are often surrendering core business logic to a vendor. On the flip side, the "build it yourself" approach (with various open-source protocols) offers more control and less vendor lock-in, but it’s a heavier lift. It requires significant work to package everything into something usable.
While these new products and applications solve agent orchestration problems, I still see the biggest challenge being access to the system of record.
Gaining approval to access and integrate with these core systems is the real "final boss" for AI in the enterprise and it's one that can't be solved for by third parties. A fancy agent layer doesn't mean much if it can't safely talk to the data that actually runs the business.
It’s also fascinating to watch OpenAI go toe-to-toe with its own partners. By launching Frontier, they are now directly competing with Microsoft’s Copilot and Salesforce’s Agentforce. It’s a bold move, one that makes me wonder if this is a strategic play to shore up enterprise value as they prepare for a potential IPO.
Moving from "selling tokens" to "selling digital infrastructure" is a much stickier business model, but only if the field tests hold up in complex, regulated environments.
It will be interesting to see what is reported over the next few weeks as Frontier is trialed and tested. I look forward to seeing how others in the space respond as well.
P.S.
The pic at the top is from the Brooklyn Museum's Monet and Venice exhibit, sadly it just closed
Monet and Venice
Be transported to Venice in New York's largest museum show dedicated to Monet in over 25 years.
