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OpenAI introduced OpenAI Presence, an enterprise-targeted product/layer designed to help organizations define, deploy, evaluate and improve AI agents across workflows, the company announced on Wednesday. Currently, OpenAI Presence is available to eligible enterprise customers as a deployed product through a limited general availability program.
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Presence will provide a “shared foundation for company context, policies, permissions, guardrails, actions and evaluations so agents can deliver a consistent experience across voice, chat and other channels while adapting to the specific workflow they’re supporting,” an OpenAI spokesperson told No Jitter in an email. Presence is built for “high-value enterprise use cases” in customer support, sales development, procurement, IT and HR.
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OpenAI’s forward-deployed engineers and systems integrator partners will work with customers to identify the workflows to be automated. Presence AI agents will only be able to access the data and systems required to complete a workflow, which might be internal- or external-facing, such as billing, insurance claims or IT service requests. OpenAI and its partners will help customers connect the necessary systems, establish permissions and policies, test agents and bring them into production, per the announcement.
With the introduction of Presence as a standalone enterprise offering, OpenAI appears to be staking out ground in the rapidly moving, agentic AI-powered contact center, CCaaS and CX space — a niche in which many vendors already occupy well-fortified positions. Moreover, there are hundreds ofconversational AIstartups, as well as many other CX-centric software vendors. Most, if not all, of these vendors lease access to OpenAI’s foundation models.
“Presence addresses a different challenge than standalone AI models or agent-building tools: helping enterprises consistently define how AI represents their business, with a shared agent definition across channels, built-in simulations, graders and guardrails before deployment, [and] a continuous improvement loop powered by production signals and Codex,” OpenAI wrote
When the AI agents go live, Presence will help teams identify where they are working well, and what needs attention and updates. Deployment teams will use Codex to investigate those signals and then test proposed changes against the live agent version to ensure the update addresses the issue.
Presence also includes “hands-on deployment support from OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineers, the OpenAI Deployment Company and select global systems integrators,” OpenAI said. Those systems integrators were not specified.
OpenAI said that Presence powers its AI English phone support channel at 1-888-GPT-0090 and, as deployed in this function, Presence can understand open-ended requests, verify a caller’s identity, use account context and take approved actions such as resolving billing issues, making account changes and processing refunds. Presence can also escalate to a human agent when necessary.
Presence currently resolves 75% of inbound issues without human assistance and its “Codex-powered improvement loop reduced human handoffs by 15 percentage points in just 10 days,” per the announcement.
Presence is designed to evolve alongside OpenAI’s various models, including GPT-Live and GPT-5.6, which the company says will enable “natural, real-time voice conversations, [with] Presence providing the enterprise capabilities around governance, integrations and continuous improvement.”
OpenAI cited several early customers, including BBVA Mexico, SoftBank Corp. and Retail Insurance Australia, IAG. BBVA said it was using Presence to “deliver a faster, more seamless and more personalized experience.” SoftBank noted that its “frontline teams have rated the agent’s Japanese-language conversations highly for their natural and accurate quality.” And, IAG said it sees “an opportunity to use Presence to deploy trusted customer agents that provide timely, reliable support for our customers during moments that matter.”
During the limited general availability phase, deployments are scoped individually based on each customer’s use case and implementation needs “with broader pricing details to come as availability expands,” OpenAI said.
(Clarification: This story was updated to clarify how Presence’s abilities will work alongside OpenAI’s models.)
