OpenAI Frontier: The Implications
Reasons to be bullish on OpenAI and Anthropic's new enterprise AI efforts
Welcome to The Weekender -- a new format where I break down the most important Enterprise AI developments from the past week.
I’ve been in NY for the past week (a big mistake, it’s freezing) seeing my Substack subs ranging from startup founders, system integrators, and AI transform firms.
And I noticed one common pattern. Everyone’s assuming that enterprise AI adoption will remain messy and hard due to integration pains (”customer’s data is a mess”) and education hurdles (”customers are clueless about AI let alone know how to build AI agents”). Hence, FDEs and EM / PMs are needed to manage engagements and handhold customers.
But things are changing so fast that these assumptions will age terribly over a 12-18 month horizon, even sooner. If that happens, it’s obvious where the value accrues. In fact, I am actively advising young engineers from becoming FDEs, which is fast becoming a program management job w/o meaningful technical challenge (unless you like that, of course, YMMV).
What many are missing:
First, every incumbent vendor has woken up to the importance of the “last mile” of AI, and is spinning up FDE and white glove GTM programs as we speak. They are embracing services, aka “schlep” and bundling FDEs to sell their platforms. This means startups have a shrinking window where their GTM is a differentiator. Most startups also know this, which is why they are hiring more sales people than developers, since their products don’t sell themselves like Claude Code.
Second, more importantly, new technology is being invented where AI adoption doesn’t involve enormous integration pains. More on that.
So what happened?
This past week’s been very eventful, but I’ve picked out two discussion points in this edition of weekender.
First, OpenAI launched Frontier and formally announced that they are bundling FDEs with a new enterprise AI agent platform called Frontier. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve seen on the market, and if it works as advertised, I believe it will absolutely destroy AI startups’ offerings regardless of the vertical domain.
This is the crux of our post today. Related: OpenAI’s enterprise AI strategy for 2026.
Second, KPMG accidentally wrote the playbook for compressing consulting margins to zero. Supposedly, KPMG asked its own BPO to “pass on its AI savings”, stiffing them of a few hundred grand. Which is funny, because KPMG itself is a service firm that uses AI. All this is pointing to services being toast.
Two different stories, same punchline: the FDE model is eating the world until there’s nothing left to be eaten.
Let’s get into it.
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