OpenAI on Thursday rolled out a new platform called Frontier, a new push into the enterprise market at a moment when investors are openly questioning what artificial intelligence means for the future of software, finance, and white-collar work.The timing could hardly be more dramatic.
Just days earlier, software stocks from PayPal to Expedia and Intuit plunged more than 10% in a single afternoon, erasing over $300 billion in market value. The selloff was fueled by a growing fear on Wall Street: that powerful new AI systems won’t just assist traditional software. They may make large parts of it obsolete.
Against that backdrop, OpenAI is trying to make a very different case. Frontier is designed to help companies build, deploy, and manage AI “agents”, software workers that can process information, run code, work with files, and pull data from multiple sources to complete tasks.
Frontier works with OpenAI’s previously announced agent-building tools and makes it easier for businesses to connect the many data streams their agents need, from internal documents to customer systems and messaging apps.
In a call with reporters, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, described these agents as “AI co-workers” that collaborate with humans rather than replace them. Crucially, Frontier is built to support agents not only from OpenAI, but also from competitors such as Anthropic and Microsoft.
Her prediction was sweeping:
“By the end of the year, most digital work in leading enterprises will be directed by people and executed by fleets of agents. This is already true for coding, and it’s going to happen for many other areas, too.”
OpenAI has not disclosed pricing, and Frontier is currently available only to a limited set of customers. Early users include Intuit, State Farm, Thermo Fisher, and Uber, with dozens more testing the platform.
For agents to work in real business settings, they’ll often need access to systems like Salesforce for customer data and Slack for workplace communications. OpenAI has also struck partnerships with companies such as ServiceNow, integrating its models directly into their enterprise software.
At a time when investors are punishing software stocks on fears of disruption, Simo emphasized that Frontier isn’t meant to wipe out existing tools.
Instead, OpenAI is positioning it as a distribution platform, a place where software companies can deploy their own AI agents.
“We’re not going to build every single AI agent that companies need,” Simo said. “That’s why we have built the platform in a way where all these software companies can deploy their agents on top of us.”
Potential partners include OpenAI backer Microsoft, along with Oracle and SAP, all of which already offer specialized AI agents to automate business processes. Under this model, Frontier becomes a kind of standard layer, allowing enterprises to mix and match agents while drawing on their existing data.
Strategically, this also helps OpenAI compete with rivals like Anthropic and Google for corporate customers, while pulling more businesses into OpenAI’s broader ecosystem. The San Francisco-based company is also laying groundwork for a potential public listing later this year, according to previous reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
Why markets are rattled
Frontier’s debut comes amid one of the sharpest reassessments of the software sector in years. Earlier this week, both OpenAI and Anthropic released new tools that intensified investor anxiety. Anthropic expanded its Claude-powered Cowork assistant with specialized plug-ins, including one for legal work. OpenAI, meanwhile, launched a new version of Codex that operates similarly to Anthropic’s agent-based apps.
The reaction was swift and brutal. Shares of financial-data and analytics firms, including S&P Global, FactSet, MSCI, Intercontinental Exchange, and London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), all tumbled, despite the fact that Anthropic’s legal tools had little to do with financial data directly.
LSEG alone slid 13% on Tuesday. S&P Global and FactSet posted double-digit losses, while ICE and MSCI fell more than 5%.
The message from investors was clear: AI is no longer seen as a niche threat. It’s being priced in across entire industries.
UBS analyst Michael Werner summed it up:
“The market has cast a very broad net as to which companies can be exposed to AI risk. You don’t have to be in the crosshairs of this particular AI risk. You can be in the periphery.”
The fear is that AI agents capable of coding, reviewing contracts, or analyzing data could undermine business models built on human expertise and proprietary tools.
That anxiety has already spread beyond software. In India, shares of Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services fell around 7% as investors weighed the impact on outsourcing. Semiconductor stocks were hit next, with Advanced Micro Devices plunging 17% after earnings, Palantir dropping 12%, and SanDisk sliding 16%.
Even AI bellwethers weren’t spared: Nvidia is down nearly 9% this week, while Meta has retreated more than 6%.
Is Wall Street overreacting? Not everyone agrees with the market’s bleak interpretation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back strongly, arguing that AI systems will rely on existing software rather than replace it.
“Would you use a hammer or invent a new hammer?” Huang asked at a Cisco event. “There’s a whole bunch of software companies whose stock prices are under a lot of pressure because somehow AI is going to replace them. It is the most illogical thing in the world.”
That view aligns closely with OpenAI’s messaging around Frontier: AI agents still need databases, enterprise platforms, and proprietary data to function.
Financial-data providers make the same argument. LSEG Chief Executive David Schwimmer said last year that “AI cannot replicate or replace our real-time data.”
Still, investors aren’t waiting for the debate to settle.
Software-company loans are already trading lower, with about $25 billion now priced at distressed levels, nearly a third of all troubled loans, according to PitchBook LCD. The extra yield investors demand to hold these loans has jumped sharply in just weeks.
JPMorgan analyst Toby Ogg put it starkly:
“We are now in an environment where the sector isn’t just guilty until proven innocent but is now being sentenced before trial.”
The broader picture is one of rotation. Money is flowing out of expensive tech stocks and into more traditional sectors tied to economic growth. On Wednesday, investors pushed up shares of companies like Eli Lilly, Old Dominion Freight Line, and MGM Resorts, while energy, materials, and consumer staples all posted strong gains.
