The consultants are coming. And this time, they have an AI platform in hand.
OpenAI announced it has formed multi-year partnerships with McKinsey & Co., Boston Consulting Group, Accenture and Capgemini under a new initiative called Frontier Alliances. The partnerships are designed to help enterprises deploy Frontier, OpenAI’s new platform for building and managing AI agents across company-wide operations.
The work those consultants are being hired to do—redesigning operating models, managing workforce change, embedding AI into day-to-day workflows—sits squarely in the territory HR leaders have long claimed as their own and have been on the front line of cultivating in the AI age.
What OpenAI’s Frontier platform does
OpenAI describes Frontier as a “semantic layer for the enterprise,” a unified platform that lets AI agents navigate business software, execute workflows and make decisions across an organization’s entire technology stack. That includes CRM systems, internal ticketing tools and, notably, HR platforms.
“Frontier gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work: shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback and clear permissions and boundaries,” according to OpenAI’s announcement. “That’s how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers that work across the business.”
HR teams and business leaders are aware that AI orchestration is the linchpin between innovative AI tools and widespread adoption that meets the needs of organizations and employees. “We’ve learned that teams don’t just need better tools that solve pieces of the puzzle,” write OpenAI authors. “They needed help getting agents into production with an end-to-end approach to build, deploy and manage agents.”
Read more: Gen AI adoption: Insights from HR leaders across industries
But is it a new class of ‘co-workers’?
These aren’t chatbots. These agents pull data from one system, execute processes in another and escalate only when a decision requires human judgment. OpenAI has framed the agents as “AI co-workers.”
This concept carries obvious implications for how companies approach headcount, job design and workforce planning. But some say it’s a mistake to treat agents as anything other than tech. In fact, HR Executive columnist Peter Cappelli recently penned an article about the “fallacy” of treating AI agents as co-workers.
“Don’t expect the AI agent embedded in your marketing workflow to buy Girl Scout cookies. They aren’t going to care if you forget their birthday. They aren’t going to bet on the March Madness pool (and if they want to, don’t let them, as they may be very good),” wrote Cappelli. “They don’t care what we think about them.”
Division of labor signals
Back on the topic of the consultants, the Frontier function is currently available to a limited set of customers, with broader rollout expected over the coming months. Early adopters include Oracle and Uber, according to OpenAI.
Under the Frontier Alliances structure, the consultants are positioned as strategy and operating model partners. Their assignment is to help leadership teams decide where and how to deploy agents at scale, and to manage the organizational change that follows. They may also take a more technical role, handling systems integration, data architecture and the work of connecting Frontier to the platforms enterprises already run on.
Something to note as news of the alliances hit the C-suite: HR leaders are absent from the Frontier Alliances announcement so far. OpenAI named no CHROs as stakeholders. The announcement makes no mention of people functions as co-owners of the transformation these firms will lead.
The compliance implications
For decades, external consultants have cycled through enterprises seeking transformation, so HR has navigated this dynamic before. But this wave presents a fresh challenge as the technology being deployed directly touches HR’s own systems and processes.
SaaS platforms that anchor most enterprise HR tech functions are among the providers that some analysts say face displacement risk from OpenAI’s Frontier platform. If consultancy teams are advising the C-suite to migrate workflows off those platforms and onto an AI agent orchestration layer, HR leaders need to be part of that conversation.
Additionally, there’s a dimension to this story that extends well beyond organizational tech procurement. AI agents embedded in hiring, performance management or workforce planning workflows trigger a thicket of legal and regulatory obligations.
HR Executive coverage underscores the mounting legal risks of AI in hiring, from Eightfold and Workday lawsuits alleging bias to EEOC warnings against “scaling discrimination” via opaque algorithms. Increasing state and jurisdictional regulations demand transparency, testing and human oversight. Some experts have called these cases the “tip of the iceberg” for employer liability.
Corporate consultants have deep expertise in operating model design. They lack deep expertise in employment law and the compliance requirements governing AI use in HR decisions. If a consulting team redesigns a performance management process around AI agents without HR and legal blessings, the organization may not discover the exposure until it’s too late.
This approach isn’t turf protection, because HR execs hold critical context that consultants typically don’t, namely, expertise on the legal landscape around AI in employment decisions. HR leaders also have a pulse on cultural dynamics that determine whether a change management plan will actually work and the employee experience implications of deploying autonomous agents in people-facing workflows.
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