OpenAI launches Presence for enterprise voice and chat agents

OpenAI has introduced OpenAI Presence, a limited-availability enterprise product for companies that want AI agents to handle customer and internal workflows across voice and chat. The company announced the product on July 22, positioning it as infrastructure for production deployments rather than a self-serve chatbot builder.

Presence is designed for use cases such as billing support, insurance claims, outbound sales, employee IT requests, and HR service tasks. OpenAI says each deployment starts with a defined job, limited knowledge access, approved system permissions, escalation rules, and policies set by the customer. The product combines model reasoning with guardrails, simulations, evaluation tools, approved actions, and a Codex-powered process for proposing improvements after launch.

Why it matters

The launch reflects a shift in enterprise AI from pilots toward operational agents that can authenticate users, consult account or policy data, and take actions inside business systems. That raises the stakes for reliability and governance. OpenAI says Presence gives companies control over what an agent may do, when it needs approval, and when a human should take over. It also says production sessions and escalations are used to identify gaps, with suggested changes tested and approved before rollout.

OpenAI is making the product available to eligible enterprise customers through a limited general availability program. Deployments are led by OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers and selected systems integrators, and the company says Presence is not yet available as a self-serve product. The announcement also says OpenAI will continue supporting voice customers through frontier-model access in the OpenAI API.

Early deployments

• OpenAI says Presence powers its English-language phone support channel at 1-888-GPT-0090.
• The company says the system now resolves 75% of inbound issues without human assistance and reduced human handoffs by 15 percentage points in 10 days through its improvement loop.
• OpenAI named BBVA, SoftBank, and IAG among enterprises exploring or testing Presence-based voice support.

The announcement is OpenAI's claim about its own enterprise product, so the performance figures should be read as company-reported results rather than independent benchmarks. Still, Presence gives a clearer shape to how OpenAI intends to sell governed agents to large organizations: not only by providing models, but by packaging deployment work, monitoring, policy controls, and continuous evaluation into a managed production offering.

Sources

• openai.com
• openai.com

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