• 2 min read
OpenAI sells Presence with engineers on site
OpenAI is packaging AI agents as a consulting-led enterprise service, not a self-serve API, starting with customer support and sales workflows.
Image: The Register
OpenAI is taking a more hands-on route into the enterprise market with Presence, a new web service for deploying AI agents across voice and chat. The company says the product is aimed at common business tasks including customer support, outbound sales, and high-risk internal workflows.
According to OpenAI, Presence can handle tasks such as resolving billing issues by understanding a request, verifying a customer, looking up account details, applying company policy, and taking an approved action. Companies can also set policies and governance controls to shape how agents behave.
The control layer includes an agent editor, an agent playground, and a simulation tool for testing how an agent responds to tasks like customer refunds, order status requests, and account deletion. But OpenAI is not launching Presence as another self-serve API.
Instead, the product is being sold through the OpenAI Deployment Company and its Forward Deployed Engineers, the field team OpenAI introduced last year and expanded through its May acquisition of consultancy Tomoro. OpenAI said deployments are led by those engineers and selected global systems integrators, adding that Presence is not yet available as a self-serve product.
OpenAI says it already uses Presence internally for its English-language phone support. The company said the system can understand open-ended requests, verify identity when needed, use account context, and take approved actions including billing fixes, account changes, and eligible refunds. If needed, it can also hand a case to a human.
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That human fallback may matter. Gartner said last month that by 2027, half of organizations planning to move customer service to AI will drop those plans.
“While AI offers significant potential to transform customer service, it is not a panacea. The human touch remains irreplaceable in many interactions, and organizations must balance technology with human empathy and understanding.”
Still, SoftBank appears interested. The company, which has committed $60 billion to OpenAI, said it is exploring how Presence could support customer agents that communicate naturally, connect to the systems needed to resolve requests, and represent SoftBank consistently. Tadahisa Murakami, VP and head of SoftBank’s data and digital transformation division, said frontline teams rated the agent’s Japanese-language conversations highly for their natural and accurate quality.
For now, pricing remains opaque. OpenAI said that during this limited GA phase, deployments are scoped individually based on each customer’s use case and implementation needs, with broader pricing details to come later. Presence is currently available to eligible enterprise customers, while existing voice API customers will continue to be supported.
Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via The Register
