OpenAI launches Presence, enterprise software for AI agents

OpenAI is rolling out a new product designed to help the company expand beyond the fiercely competitive market for AI models.

The offering, called OpenAI Presence, enables companies to run AI agents more effectively by connecting these systems to internal corporate data, policies, existing software, and workflows.

Key Capabilities

Presence is built to automate parts of customer support, sales, and other tasks, including:

• Fixing billing issues
• Supporting insurance claims
• Resolving employee IT service requests

Features

The new service includes tools that allow customers to test their agents for specific jobs, such as:

• Simulations
• Guardrails
• Human review
• Automated graders that use AI to check agent outputs

Once agents are deployed inside companies, OpenAI's Codex tool can investigate issues that arise and suggest updates.

Presence also comes with AI-powered voice and chat technology, helping corporate customers automate more interactions with existing and potential customers.

Availability and Access

OpenAI is making the service available to corporate customers on a case-by-case basis. Users must work with OpenAI's engineers or designated partners to access the tool.

"The agent receives only the knowledge and system access required for that job," OpenAI said. "The company sets the policies: what the agent can do, when it needs approval, and when a person should take over."

OpenAI is already using the tool internally to run its AI phone support channel for English speakers.

Strategic Context

The AI model race is becoming increasingly competitive, with rivals including Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, and others all offering increasingly capable models. This month, new open-weight Chinese AI models have demonstrated that performance gaps are narrowing, prices are falling, and many customers are becoming more willing to switch between providers.

This dynamic creates pressure on OpenAI to move into enterprise software, where products are stickier and customers buy complete business solutions rather than just AI models.

Presence appears to be part of that strategy. Instead of asking companies to build their own agent systems, OpenAI is packaging the surrounding software needed to deploy AI safely inside large organizations.

If that direction continues, OpenAI increasingly looks less like a model company and more like an enterprise software provider with AI at its core.

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