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 that 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. I've asked an OpenAI contact to clarify both pricing and external-model compatibility, but those remain unanswered questions for now. I'lll update when I hear back.

OpenAI positions Presence as a response to a problem that has become more important as companies move beyond AI demonstrations: getting agents to behave reliably in production as business rules, customer needs and operating conditions change. Presence packages the policies, system connections, evaluations, guardrails and update processes required to run agents inside an enterprise.

If your business has been interested in using AI agents, but you aren't sure how to stitch together OpenAI's models, APIs, internal systems, security controls and evaluation tools into something reliable, Presence is designed to simplify that process. Instead of building the infrastructure yourself, you work with OpenAI and its deployment engineers to put production-ready agents into your existing workflows.

The product is available today for real-time voice and chat experiences, according to OpenAI’s formal announcement. The company’s outreach materials also describe a broader ambition spanning voice, ...