It’s raining outside again. March in Shanghai is probably just like this—cold, damp, and sticky, making you not want to touch the keyboard. It just so happens that I saw OpenAI launch its enterprise-grade agent platform, Frontier, over the past couple of days. Along with that, I scrolled past the stock price fluctuations of several established overseas software companies. So, I figured I might as well brew a cup of coffee, sit down, and chat about this.
The Business of Per-Seat Pricing Might Be Coming to an End
I previously read a report on enterprise software spending. Most large companies buy a bunch of systems, but employees might only actually use two or three on a daily basis; the rest are just gathering dust. And even if they are gathering dust, you still have to pay “per-seat licenses” for these systems.
In the early use cases of Frontier presented by OpenAI this time, there is one rather terrifying detail. A global investment firm used it to save 90% of the administrative time in their sales process; a manufacturing enterprise compressed a production optimization process that originally took six weeks into a single day. How did they do it? Not by having employees click around in the existing systems, but by not requiring a human to log in at all—they just let the agent handle it directly.
This is highly intriguing. Frankly speaking, the traditional SaaS business model is built on the premise that “humans need to look at interfaces and click buttons.” If, in the future, AI silently does all the cross-system work in the background and human employees never even open your software, on what grounds can you still charge such expensive per-seat subscription fees? This is likely the real reason why those traditional, established software giants are feeling chills down their spines lately.
The Suspended “Ghost Layer”
Digging into the design philosophy of Frontier, you’ll discover a rather cunning logical trade-off.
Generally, when we want to make software smarter, our first instinct is to modify the software itself—the so-called “embedded” approach. Over the past couple of years, major tech giants have been stuffing various Copilots into their systems, but the results? Well, they are basically fighting their own isolated battles.
OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer, Denise Dresser, dropped a truth bomb in an interview a few days ago: Most companies simply lack an easy way to let agents work like colleagues without having to overhaul their entire legacy systems.
Therefore, Frontier chose to be an “overlay”. It acts like a ghost suspended in mid-air, connecting existing systems via open APIs to create a shared business context.
This leads to a logical contradiction. Veteran software vendors spent over a decade building their respective turfs, originally hoping to firmly lock users into their interfaces. But now, someone has cast a giant net over everything, instantly downgrading them into glorified water pipes that only spew out data. As a side note, seeing Barret Zoph leave Thinking Machines Lab and return to OpenAI to head up this B2B business made me realize: once these hardcore tech folks set their minds on business orchestration, they really know how to hit the nail on the head.
Everyone Is Painting a Rosy Picture, But Who Foots the Bill?
Let’s do a horizontal comparison of the current landscape.
On one side, we have the “Embedded Camp,” such as the industry-leading, old-school CRM and ERP players. The advantage is that you don’t have to worry about data leaking out; it stays within an environment you are familiar with. The downside is that it’s blind—it can’t see the data in other vendors’ software.
On the other side is the “Overlay Camp,” featuring OpenAI’s Frontier alongside Anthropic’s recently launched Claude Cowork. Cross-platform, flexible, and no need to refactor systems. Sounds absolutely perfect, right?
But there’s a catch you need to know: bluntly speaking, OpenAI still doesn’t dare to publicly disclose Frontier’s specific pricing. When asked about this at the press conference, executives flat-out refused to reveal it.
Why not make it public? Yesterday, while testing another open-source multi-agent framework on my local server, I found that to confirm a single task, multiple agents have to repeatedly communicate, correct errors, and call tools in the background. The token consumption skyrockets exponentially. You might think you’ve hired a tireless robotic employee, but when you look at the bill at the end of the month—good heavens—the compute cost might be more expensive than buying dozens of software licenses. Until the economic ledger of multi-agent systems is clearly balanced, I’m actually a bit skeptical about how many enterprises can truly get this running ╮(￣▽￣)╭.
Some Things I Sometimes Think About
Following this line of thought, I sometimes wonder: will future software still need to look the way it does now?
All of our current user interfaces—those menu bars, drop-down boxes, and dashboards—are designed entirely to cater to humans’ pitiful visual processing bandwidth and sluggish fingers. If 80% of operations in the future are performed by cross-platform agents, will the ultimate fate of software be reduced to just a bunch of API endpoints?
Maybe I’m overthinking it. After all, for certain key decisions, bosses still need to see a pretty pie chart to feel at ease. But I always have this creeping feeling that handing over full cross-system orchestration power to a single AI vendor is essentially replacing an old form of hostage-taking with a new one. Today, you might think it’s a great helper that breaks down information silos; tomorrow, it could be the super-hub holding the lifeblood of your entire business by the throat.
The Coffee is Cold
The rain outside seems to have let up a bit. The delivery guy just called to say my coffee is at the downstairs reception; if I don’t grab it now, it’ll probably go completely cold. Let’s leave the chat here for today.
References:
- OpenAI’s Frontier puts AI agents in a fight SaaS can’t afford to lose
- OpenAI launches Frontier, an AI agent platform that could … – Fortune
- OpenAI Frontier is a single platform to control your AI agents
—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ.
