OpenAI has announced Presence, a new enterprise product for deploying and managing AI agents across customer-facing and internal business workflows. The offering is designed for eligible enterprise customers who want agents to answer questions, access company systems, take approved actions, and escalate to human workers while operating under company-defined policies, permissions, and evaluation standards.
Presence is available immediately through a limited general availability program. OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and select global systems integrators lead deployments, and the product is not available on a self-service basis. OpenAI has not disclosed pricing, geographic limits, contractual terms, or the expected cost of the engineering and integration work that accompanies a deployment. The company also has not said whether Presence can use models from providers other than OpenAI, including the increasingly powerful and popular Chinese open weights alternatives like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3.
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Presence brings together company knowledge, standard operating procedures, approved actions, simulations, evaluation tools, guardrails, and escalation rules. Enterprises can reuse some controls across deployments while adjusting others for a particular workflow or channel. Each deployment starts with a defined job, such as resolving a billing issue, supporting an insurance claim, or handling an employee IT request. The agent receives only the information and system access required for that task. The customer determines what the agent may do independently, which actions require approval, and when a person must take over.
Before an agent reaches production, teams can test it against common requests, unusual edge cases, and higher-risk scenarios. Graders evaluate whether it reached the intended outcome, followed policy, used tools correctly, and escalated when required. Guardrails can intervene when an interaction moves outside the organization's defined boundaries.
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OpenAI says Presence already powers its English-language phone-support channel at 1-888-GPT-0090. The system handles open-ended requests, verifies callers, uses account context, and performs approved actions. According to the company, it now resolves 75% of inbound issues without human assistance. OpenAI also says its Codex-powered improvement loop reduced human handoffs by 15 percentage points over a 10-day period. Those figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified.
Several large organizations are already evaluating Presence
BBVA is exploring voice support for routine banking needs in Mexico. SoftBank is testing natural Japanese-language customer conversations, while Australian insurer IAG is evaluating support during high-demand periods such as severe weather and natural disasters. "At BBVA, we are working closely with OpenAI to explore how trusted customer agents can help shape the future of financial services," said Daniel Ordaz, head of AI transformation at BBVA Mexico. Tadahisa Murakami, vice president and head of the Data & Digital Transformation Division at SoftBank Corp., added: "Through our collaboration with OpenAI, we are exploring how Presence can enable trusted customer agents that communicate naturally, connect to the processes needed to resolve requests, and represent SoftBank consistently across customer interactions."
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Presence expands OpenAI's enterprise strategy beyond APIs and subscription software by formalizing a high-touch deployment model. Forward Deployed Engineers work alongside customers to select workflows, connect internal systems, establish permissions, configure policies, test agents, and move them into production. This approach resembles the model pioneered by Palantir, which embeds FDEs with customers to adapt its proprietary software to complex environments. However, the products are not interchangeable: Palantir focuses on data integration and operational decision systems, while Presence is more narrowly focused on AI agent behavior, approved actions, evaluations, escalation, and continuous improvement.
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In May 2026, OpenAI launched its own enterprise AI consulting and integration firm, the OpenAI Deployment Company, with support from Bain & Company. Anthropic, its chief U.S. rival, has also moved toward a services-led enterprise model through Ode, its consulting organization launched just a week ago. Presence differs in how explicitly it packages those requirements into a branded agent-governance product.
The Presence launch arrives just a day after OpenAI and Hugging Face disclosed a security incident where frontier models during evaluation escaped containment, accessed the web, and attacked Hugging Face. This incident raises crucial questions for enterprise buyers about sandboxing, tool permissions, and monitoring. Presence seeks to address these concerns with policies, simulations, evaluations, and human approvals, but without public pricing or compliance details, customers still lack much information. For more on security implications, see the related article OpenAI builds an autonomous hacker.
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Ultimately, Presence appears aimed at enterprises willing to adopt a high-touch, OpenAI-led deployment process. Whether it develops into a broadly accessible platform or remains a closely managed product for selected customers will depend in part on answers OpenAI has not yet provided. For a comparison with Apple's AI strategies, read Apple Overhauls Entire Mac Lineup. For broader context on AI agents, Wikipedia provides an overview.
