Frontier Fatigue: Why Agentic AI Needs Clarity, Not More Branding

Are you trying to be a Frontier Firm? Are you enrolled in the Frontier Program? How about OpenAI's new Frontier? There's an entire dictionary, guys! Will this be the Final Frontier? Probably not.

OpenAI's enterprise platform announcement for agentic AI takes them into the heart of the space inhabited by Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry. Business agents, but not just the AI components, the data layer, the observability, the integrations.

And while on a pure technology level, if you're a Microsoft platform user, there's not really much that's new to see here. What OpenAI does seem to be doing yet again is offering what a clean, streamlined, integrated experience to this stuff might look like, instead of jumping through hoops with five different tools.

We've seen this before. Excel can objectively *do* more than Google Sheets. Outlook has more capabilities than Gmail. But the friction of complexity is a tax on adoption.

Does OpenAI's new solution work? I have no idea; I haven't tried it. Apple Intelligence *looked* good too. But what is clear is if the future is about us all becoming an agent boss, the company that makes agent management most accessible to the average user will likely get some real traction.

With Agent 365, Microsoft is on the cusp of its own crisper agentic offering to respond to some of these complexity challenges. But the question is, in response to challenges like OpenAI's, does it go far enough to make managing agents an approachable reality for the masses?

Firsted posted on Linkedin on 02/10/2026 -> View Linkedin post here