Enterprise AI Agent Platforms Compared: OpenAI Frontier, Salesforce Agentforce, and What UK Businesses Should Actually Use

February 2026 brought a significant announcement: OpenAI launched Frontier, an enterprise platform designed for organisations to build, deploy, and manage AI agents — treating them, in OpenAI's words, "like human employees."

It joins an increasingly crowded field. Salesforce has Agentforce. Google offers Vertex AI Agent Builder. Microsoft has Copilot Studio. ServiceNow has AI Agents. Every major enterprise vendor now sells some flavour of "build your own AI agent."

For UK businesses trying to navigate this landscape, the question isn't whether to use AI agents — that ship has sailed. The question is: which platform, and at what cost?

The Platform Landscape in February 2026

OpenAI Frontier

OpenAI's newest offering positions itself as the enterprise-grade agent management layer. Key features:

• Agent workforce management — deploy, monitor, and manage multiple agents from a centralised dashboard
• Role-based access control — agents get defined permissions, similar to employee access levels
• Built-in compliance logging — audit trails for every agent action
• Native GPT-4o and o3 integration — agents use OpenAI's latest models out of the box
• API-first design — integrates with existing enterprise systems

Pricing: Enterprise tier, likely £15–50 per agent per month plus token usage. Exact UK pricing not yet confirmed.

Strengths: If you're already in the OpenAI ecosystem (using ChatGPT Team or Enterprise), the integration is seamless. The compliance and audit features are genuinely useful for regulated industries.

Weaknesses: Vendor lock-in to OpenAI models. Your agent data flows through OpenAI's infrastructure. For UK businesses with strict data residency requirements, this is a significant consideration.

Salesforce Agentforce

Salesforce's agent platform is deeply embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem:

• CRM-native agents — built specifically for sales, service, marketing, and commerce workflows
• Einstein Trust Layer — data grounding, toxicity filtering, and audit trails
• Pre-built agent templates — service agents, sales coaches, commerce assistants
• Flow integration — agents can trigger and be triggered by Salesforce automation flows
• Multi-model support — uses Salesforce's own models plus third-party LLMs

Pricing: Varies by Salesforce edition. Agentforce features are bundled into Enterprise and Unlimited plans, with per-conversation pricing for autonomous interactions.

Strengths: If you're a Salesforce shop, this is the path of least resistance. The CRM integration is unmatched — agents have full context on customer history, pipeline, and interactions.

Weaknesses: Only useful if you're already paying for Salesforce. The cost stacks on top of already-expensive licenses. Limited to CRM-adjacent use cases.

Google Vertex AI Agent Builder

Google's approach emphasises integration with Google Cloud services:

• Grounding in Google Search — agents can access real-time web information
• Enterprise search integration — ground agents on your internal documents via Vertex AI Search
• Multi-turn conversation management — sophisticated dialogue handling
• Gemini model family — access to Google's latest models
• BigQuery integration — agents can query your data warehouse directly

Pricing: Pay-per-use based on token consumption and API calls. Typically more cost-effective for high-volume, data-heavy use cases.

Strengths: Excellent for data-intensive applications. If your business runs on Google Cloud, the integration with BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and other services is compelling.

Weaknesses: Google's enterprise AI products have a history of rapid deprecation and renaming. The ecosystem is powerful but can feel unstable for long-term planning.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft's agent builder lives inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem:

• Power Platform integration — agents connect to Power Automate, Power Apps, and Dataverse
• Microsoft 365 knowledge — agents can access SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook
• Generative AI plugins — extend agents with custom actions
• Security and compliance — inherits Microsoft 365 governance policies

Pricing: Included in some Microsoft 365 plans; standalone pricing starts at approximately £150/month per environment.

Strengths: If your business runs on Microsoft 365 (and most UK businesses do), this is the easiest on-ramp. Agents that can read your SharePoint, draft in Word, and manage your Teams channels are immediately useful.

Weaknesses: Tightly coupled to the Microsoft ecosystem. Performance can be inconsistent. The "Copilot" branding covers everything from AI features in Excel to fully autonomous agents, making it hard to understand what you're actually getting.

The Open-Source Alternative

Here's what the enterprise platform vendors don't emphasise: you can build equivalent agent capabilities using open-source tools at a fraction of the cost.

Frameworks like OpenClaw, CrewAI, LangGraph, and AutoGen provide:

• Model flexibility — use any LLM provider (or run models locally)
• Full data control — everything stays on your infrastructure
• No per-agent licensing — you pay for compute and API usage, nothing else
• Customisation — build exactly what you need, not what the vendor anticipated
• Portability — switch models, providers, or infrastructure without rebuilding

The trade-off is clear: you need more technical capability to deploy and maintain open-source agents. But for UK businesses with even modest technical resources, the economics are compelling.

Cost Comparison: A Real Scenario

Consider a UK professional services firm deploying three AI agents:

1. An email triage agent processing 200 emails per day
2. A document analysis agent reviewing 50 documents per week
3. A client communication agent drafting 30 responses per day

Platform	Estimated Monthly Cost	Data Location
OpenAI Frontier	£800–£1,500	US (OpenAI servers)
Salesforce Agentforce	£1,200–£2,500 (plus Salesforce licenses)	US/EU (Salesforce infrastructure)
Microsoft Copilot Studio	£500–£1,000 (plus M365 licenses)	UK/EU (Microsoft data centres)
Open-source (OpenClaw + Claude API)	£150–£400	Your choice (on-premise possible)

The open-source route costs 60–85% less, and gives you complete control over where your data lives.

Decision Framework for UK Businesses

Choose an enterprise platform when:

• You're already heavily invested in that vendor's ecosystem
• You lack technical staff to manage infrastructure
• Compliance requires a vendor relationship with SLAs and support contracts
• Speed of deployment matters more than cost optimisation
• Your use case is standard — customer service, sales support, document processing

Choose open-source when:

• Data sovereignty is non-negotiable — you need to know exactly where data goes
• You have technical capability (even one competent developer or a specialist partner)
• Cost matters — especially for SMEs where platform licensing eats into margins
• You need customisation — your workflows don't fit neatly into pre-built templates
• You want model flexibility — the ability to switch between Claude, GPT, Gemini, or local models as pricing and capabilities evolve

Choose a hybrid approach when:

• Some workflows are standard (email, calendar) and some are custom (industry-specific processes)
• You want to start quickly with a platform but plan to migrate high-value workflows to custom solutions
• Different departments have different needs — marketing might benefit from Copilot Studio while operations needs something purpose-built

What We Recommend for UK SMEs

For most UK businesses with fewer than 500 employees, our recommendation is straightforward:

Start with open-source. Deploy a framework like OpenClaw for your first two or three agent workflows. Use cloud LLM APIs (Claude or GPT-4o) for the intelligence layer. Keep the deployment simple — a single server or even a Mac Mini running the agent framework.

Why? Because at the SME scale:

• Platform licensing costs are disproportionate to the value delivered
• Your workflows are specific enough to need customisation anyway
• Data control is simpler when you own the infrastructure
• You learn more about how agents work, which makes you a better buyer if you do move to a platform later

For larger organisations or those in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, legal), a platform may make sense — but even then, run the cost comparison first. The gap is significant.

The Vendor Lock-In Warning

Every enterprise platform wants to be your only agent platform. They're designed to make it easy to start and hard to leave. Consider:

• Data format portability — can you export your agent configurations, training data, and conversation logs in a standard format?
• Model dependency — if you build agents on OpenAI Frontier, they only work with OpenAI models. What happens when a competitor offers better performance at lower cost?
• Integration depth — the deeper you integrate, the harder the migration. This isn't always bad, but go in with your eyes open.

The MCP (Model Context Protocol) standard is helping here by creating a common interface between agents and tools. Agents built with MCP-compatible integrations can, in principle, move between platforms. In practice, it's still early — but it's a promising direction.

Bottom Line

The enterprise AI agent platform market is noisy, expensive, and designed to create dependency. For UK SMEs, the smarter play is almost always:

1. Start with open-source — learn what works for your business
2. Measure ruthlessly — know exactly what value agents deliver
3. Scale deliberately — add agents for validated workflows only
4. Consider platforms later — when (and if) the economics make sense at your scale

The agents themselves are the value. The platform is just plumbing. Choose the plumbing that fits your budget, your data requirements, and your growth plans — not the one with the best marketing.

Get Help Choosing

Navigating the agent platform landscape is what we do. If you're evaluating options for your UK business, book a consultation — we'll help you run the numbers and make the right call for your specific situation.

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Caversham Digital helps UK businesses deploy AI agents — whether on enterprise platforms or open-source frameworks. We're model-agnostic, vendor-neutral, and focused on what actually works.