• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

HP's personal computers and printers division has partnered with OpenAI's enterprise part of the company, Frontier, to transition from isolated AI chatbots to autonomous "AI coworkers" capable of handling complete multi-step tasks.

The partnership extends how HP runs Frontier's capabilities to help support customer-facing experiences and accelerate transformation across its operations.

The partnership will focus on deploying AI across the organization in areas ranging from customer and partner-facing solutions and experiences, customer telemetry insights and reporting, employee productivity and software development.

The shift is in line with Juniper Research's latest agentic commerce growth predictions released Monday. It estimates that the number of agentic commerce users will reach 1.3 billion by 2031, up from less than 300 million in 2026.

The total value of agentic commerce transactions is estimated to grow 43,240% from $8 billion in 2026 to $3.5 trillion by 2031, according to the study.

While user familiarity and trust with agentic commerce still remains low, the research found this is expected to change as more people trust the technology and the processes to agentic capabilities.

The report attributed three factors to growth. The emergence of direct support from major retailers, growing comfort levels with AI systems, and increased availability of agentic payment infrastructure.

HP began testing OpenAI Frontier in February 2026. One engineer used OpenAI models to move through 122 pull requests across 43 projects in weeks, which refers to a real-world productivity benchmark that demonstrates how generative AI accelerates software engineering.

A security team used these models to remediate several software bugs in a day -- work they estimated could otherwise have taken up to a month.

It soon became clear the tools could move from experiment to daily workflow quickly, which is a process that Chris Willis, chief design officer and futurist at Domo, suggested is required, even with AI.

Willis warned that sometimes engineers using new AI tools want to skip the first three steps of developing apps — problem solving, planning and prioritizing — and go straight to prototyping and testing. With vibe coding, developers sometimes skip the work that prove the app can solve the problems.

OpenAI Frontier acts as the connective layer for HP. Agents need to know the context to trust, tools they can access, actions they are allowed to take, and how their outputs will be evaluated over time.

The connective layer in ecommerce supports pricing, partners, online store, and workflows. HP, through OpenAI, said its channel ecosystem runs 80% of its business through partners, and 100,000 partners use its Partner Portal globally.

Frontier will help HP create a consistent self-service layer across store, partner, chat and voice experiences, giving customers and partners faster ways to get answers, complete routine workflows, and move toward resolution or conversion.