OpenAI Enlists Consulting Giants to Push Enterprise AI Platform Frontier

OpenAI is betting big on its new enterprise AI platform Frontier, but the ChatGPT maker isn't going it alone. The company has enlisted four of the world's largest consulting firms—Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, and McKinsey—to help push its ambitious agent-making tool into the enterprise market.

The Frontier Alliance partnership represents OpenAI's recognition that selling complex AI infrastructure to large organizations requires more than just technical prowess. According to Forrester senior analyst Akshara Naik Lopez, attempting to scale Frontier globally without consulting partners would be "a hard and a time-consuming process."

Why Consulting Partners Matter

The consulting firms bring critical expertise that OpenAI lacks in-house. "A lot of these firms bring other best practices and expertise in areas such as cybersecurity services, data services, sovereignty setup services etc.," Naik Lopez explained. "These will also be increasingly needed if Frontier is to gain high adoption numbers."

Each partner will create dedicated teams certified on OpenAI technology, with OpenAI providing technical resources, roadmap insights, and access to product and research teams. This structure mirrors how traditional enterprise software giants like Oracle and SAP have scaled globally through partner ecosystems.

The Enterprise AI Challenge

Frontier aims to create and control role-based AI agents throughout organizations—essentially AI coworkers that can work across business functions. Early adopters include HP, Intuit, Oracle, State Farm, and Uber, with Cisco and T-Mobile piloting the platform.

However, the analyst emphasized that enterprise adoption requires more than just agent-building capabilities. "Without a proper structure to bring in all the process context, skills, competencies from various applications, ability to handle agent security and governance, ability to measure its performance—it is just an agent," Naik Lopez said. "All these are crucial for it to be 'enterprise ready.'"

Competitive Pressure Mounts

OpenAI's move comes as it faces intensifying competition in the AI space. Anthropic's Claude Code has garnered positive attention for its coding capabilities, while Google's Gemini and Microsoft's in-house large language models pose significant threats.

The company is also testing advertisements on its free models and navigating a massive $100 billion fundraising campaign that has valued OpenAI as high as $850 billion. Major investors including Amazon, Nvidia, Softbank, and Microsoft have already committed.

The Road Ahead

Industry observers expect OpenAI to expand its partner network beyond the initial four consultancies if it hopes to achieve global enterprise scale. "I would not be surprised if, in the future, these partners will become resellers of Frontier platforms—but that is looking way out in the future," Naik Lopez noted.

The Frontier Alliance represents a strategic pivot for OpenAI from consumer-focused products to enterprise infrastructure, acknowledging that even tech giants need partners to succeed in complex B2B markets. As AI agents become increasingly central to business operations, the ability to deploy them securely, govern them effectively, and measure their performance will determine which platforms win enterprise adoption.

For OpenAI, the message is clear: in the enterprise AI race, it takes a village—or at least four of the world's largest consulting firms—to compete effectively.