What's this about?
OpenAI launched Presence, a product for companies that want to deploy AI agents facing real customers — answering calls, resolving billing issues, filing insurance claims — with policies, approval rules, and human escalation built in. It already powers OpenAI's own support phone line (1-888-GPT-0090), resolving 75% of inbound issues with no human involved.
What exactly is an "AI agent" here?
Not a chatbot that just answers questions — an agent can *take actions*: look up your account, apply a refund, escalate to a person. Presence is the wrapper that makes this safe for a bank or airline: the company defines what the agent may do, when it needs approval, and when a human takes over. A Codex-powered loop then proposes improvements from real production sessions.
What's the community saying?
1.8k likes; enterprise-news pickup, little HN debate yet
- The 75% phone-support self-resolution figure is the headline stat — real production numbers, not a demo.
- Big-name pilots (BBVA banking in Mexico, SoftBank in Japanese, IAG for severe-weather surges) signal voice agents moving into regulated industries.
- This puts OpenAI in direct competition with the customer-support-AI industry (Sierra, Decagon, call-center vendors) rather than just supplying models to it.