Ep 879: New: OpenAI Presence. Has The AI Customer Service Takeover Finally Arrived? (Replay)

OpenAI announced a new offering yesterday in OpenAI Presence, a service that I thought would make a pretty big splash. Yet in the first 24-ish hours since its announcement, it's been surprisingly silent. I mean, kind of below average chatter online, below average media coverage. Nothing really went viral or took off when maybe it should have. But this emerging category needs your attention. So what is OpenAI Presence? Well, it's an enterprise AI platform that lets companies build, deploy, and manage real-time voice and chat agents for customer support, sales, HR, and IT. OpenAI says each agent improves through real-world experience. And I've thought for years that eventually one of the first big disruptions in AI would be customer service. But the real-time models weren't narrow enough or fast enough or nearly smart enough. Now they are. And the path for disruption is almost impossible to ignore. I mean, customer service has been historically poor quality, slow, not helpful, and seemingly running on pre-internet technology, let alone pre-AI technology. The other main thing worth pointing out, while Anthropic has recently been grabbing headlines by pulling models from subscription, OpenAI is seemingly focusing beyond the model now. So will your company be employing customer service agents anytime soon? And might that be a good thing or a bad thing? Well, let's find out. And welcome to Everyday AI. Here's the big picture on what's new. So OpenAI has launched their new Presence to automate customer service. So Presence lets companies deploy real-time voice and chat agents for support, sales and internal workflows. And OpenAI says that these things just get smarter the more that your company uses them in the real world interfacing with customers. And right now, customer service, does anyone actually like it? For me, it's almost the bane of my existence. I know I'm gonna have to, you know, get transferred 6 times if I have to actually call the company. Those companies that have tried to roll out voice agents were maybe ahead of the curve and the technology really wasn't ready. So I always thought that AI would be, uh, you know, kind of fitting this, uh, huge gap, but it was too early. But now we're actually there because if you haven't used OpenAI's new GPT Live or GPT Real-Time 2 models, you would not know any better. You would say, oh, any AI agent? Yeah, I've, I've heard these talking to customer service. They're slow and very robotic. Well, that's not the case anymore. So on today's show, here's what you're gonna learn. You're gonna know what OpenAI Presence actually is and why it's not the new voice model everyone assumes. You're gonna know everything that goes into building one of these agents and how OpenAI keeps it in check and how your company can too. You're gonna know the one number OpenAI is using to prove Presence works and everything that number leaves out and what this could mean for your company, your team, and every customer who maybe calls in if you are using it. All right, welcome to Everyday AI. If you're new here, my name's Jordan Wilson and we do this every day. This is This is your unedited, unscripted daily livestream podcast and free daily newsletter, helping business leaders like you and me keep up with everything that's happening in the world of AI. I tell you what matters, what doesn't. You use that information to grow your company and career. It's a cheat code. So it starts here, but make sure you go to our website at youreverydayai.com. We're gonna be recapping the main points of today's show as well as all of the other AI developments that you need to keep in mind. All right, so OpenAI presents. Let's get into it because I'm wondering if the customer service takeover is finally now arriving. Because we saw some of these earlier products launch, you know, like 2 or so years ago. It was kind of like the 2023, maybe 2024 normal AI agents launch, right? There was all this hype behind it, but the technology, I don't think for actual on-demand agents that can help you with your work, I don't think that really arrived until like the past 6 months. So the same thing we saw with voice agents, right? As soon as voice models became available, you know, commercially and from the consumer side in like late 2023, early 2024, you know, there was already this first warning sign, right? The boy who cried wolf came and said, hey, customer service, you know, all these jobs are gonna go away. But it wasn't the case. The models weren't good. But now this may be different. No. But first, I want to zoom out and not just talk about OpenAI Presence. And I want to talk about the space in general, because oftentimes it is the competition that ultimately drives the end product or the services that those products get rolled into. And reportedly, right, and we'll see and we'll be covering this tomorrow on our uh, you know, Friday feature show where we go over features that are available for everyone to use. But, uh, reportedly we'll be getting a Codex real-time voice mode soon, uh, right? That acts more like a personal assistant, like a smart AI-powered Siri that actually works. All right. So that would be amazing, but they're not the only company that's obviously investing heavily in voice as more and more people seemingly become more comfortable talking to or with AI, right? Maybe it's because of dictation. Maybe it's because, well, now the models are actually smart enough and responsive enough that we can actually use these voice models and people see how powerful that is, right? Everyone's always wanted to have their own, you know, Jarvis that you could just say something to and it, you know, understands and it thinks about it and it doesn't just give you a robotic response back. So not only maybe we be getting a new real-time voice mode from OpenAI via Codex, but also we've seen some recent leaks that show Anthropic is also going to be rolling out some new voice modes as well. And then, I mean, you can't forget Google and their Gemini Live. So when it was announced, it was actually kind of the leader of the pack. But we know that Gemini is at least temporarily behind on getting new models to market, although we did just get the Gemini 3.6 Flash. But in terms of their Pro series and Gemini Live updates, we haven't seen anything in a long time. But I would assume that whether it is part of the Gemini 4 that is now under pre-training or the Gemini 3.5 Pro that, you know, has been delayed now for a couple of months. My assumption is we will get a new Gemini Live mode. So the 3 big players here are seemingly starting to either invest or reinvest in the real-time, uh, voice space. Because like I said, now the models are smart enough. You can talk to a model and kind of how OpenAI runs this is you talk to a model and it responds and then it sends another model in the background to call tools and to search the web. And that was one of the big things that was missing. Well, number one, initially the models were not real-time and neural enough. They sounded robotic and, you know, it might have paused for a half second or a second. And when it comes to customer service and customer interactions, that's all you need to completely ruin it, right? And that's why, you know, back in 2024, so many companies did not jump on this bandwagon, rightfully so, because the technology wasn't there. But now, These models, right? They respond to you in real time, especially in the new GPT Live One and the GPT Two real time, which we'll be talking about those models and the differences between them, right? So not only can they respond to you right away and sound fairly human, but it can send another model in the background to call tools because before they couldn't really do that. So sometimes these voice models hallucinated or they couldn't really work with your data or understand. You know, what it was that you were talking about because it couldn't really do that in the background. Now it can. All right. So with that in mind, let's talk a little bit more kind of about this real-time voice race, because I always think it's important to understand that before we jump into any, you know, product or service. So OpenAI, though, has been quietly dominating the real-time AI voice space. Right. And again, I think this is one of the future modalities. I think multimodal AI, uh, so AI's interacting with your desktop at least right now, and probably after that, um, an AI that you can just talk to and it can complete work on your desktop or your phone, right? I think that is kind of the next iteration or the next wave that's coming with helpful AI. And it starts with, well, a model that you can talk to is smart and can kind of do things in the background for you. So if we look at the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index, right, so that's That's probably the best single index, right? That takes into account multiple, you know, different benchmarks. And OpenAI has been winning this space, like I said, kind of quietly because everyone for the most part is talking about just the basic, you know, text or agent benchmarks. Very few people are focusing on speech-to-speech, which is interesting to me because if more and more people, at least that are playing on the edge of AI, are dictating everything, like me, right? I think that's an, an early indicator of where the space as a whole is headed, right? I think we'll— and, and maybe we're all just waiting on Apple, uh, to finally get the smart Siri right. But that, I think, will start to shift how people work and interface with technology. So, uh, OpenAI, when it comes to this benchmark, they've been winning and it hasn't really been close. They actually have 4 of the top 6 models, including the best model in the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index in their new GPT- GPT Realtime 2. But what's interesting to me is even their GPT Realtime 1.5, the old version, is, is better than what Google has in their Gemini 3.1 Live. Alright, so let's take a quick look. And I'm going to show our livestream audience here a little bit on the kind of marketing side for what OpenAI is putting out there for OpenAI Presents. So what they said is, puts trusted AI agents to work across customer channels and internal workflows. So right now, you do have to reach out to their sales team if you want access. So it's not like you're just gonna log into ChatGPT or log into your, you know, your company's, you know, OpenAI playground and start deploying these things. So it is a very limited rollout right now. But what they say, this is trusted AI agents, and they say each agent improves through real-world experience with evaluations, guardrails, and human approval governing every change. So kind of the, the 3 ways that they break this out to explain it is they say that this gives you one presence across every channel. They say you can show up in consistent— in a consistent way across voice and chat. So ultimately, right? So if your company is looking to deploy voice agents, right? So a phone number, maybe you don't have all the humans you need to handle the volumes of calls. That's one thing. But then also on your website. Right? So it's kind of a one system that can work and stay in sync with both. So they say show up in a consistent way across voice and chat. You decide what remains consistent, such as policies, evaluations, and escalation rules, and what should change for each workflow or channel. Then they say trust built into every deployment. Connect agents to company systems, define policies and permissions, and validate performance through simulations, evaluations, guardrails, and escalation rules. Escalation paths. And then last but not least, they say improve quality continuously. Uh, they say Presence continuously gets better with use. It uses production conversations and quality signals to recommend improvements that make agents more capable. And then OpenAI has shared some use cases with some big companies that they've been testing this out with, such as BBVA, SoftBank, IAG, and then obviously their own internal use cases as well. So things that they're saying this can be used for is customer support, demand generation, claims, procurement, IT helpdesk, human resource, etc. But essentially anywhere right now where maybe your company is experiencing human bottleneck and you can't really scale at the point that you need to, whether it's for customers or maybe if you're a large organization, sometimes it's an internal, you know, almost IT, HR type shortcoming that you're running into. And, you know, I kind of want to go back to this concept of what AI unlocks. And I think that initial voice agents maybe got this all wrong because what I think initial voice agents that were too early, it was more of just scaling this technology out to as many people as possible, but in a similar way, which I think is not the point. Generative AI and artificial intelligence, right? I think a lot of people, I talk about this a lot, but they think, oh, this is an easy button. Let's get a blanket approach that works for everyone, which I think is the absolute wrong approach, right? The way that you should be doing this, and I think kind of tying in the, you know, website chat side with the voice side is very helpful, right? I think this is, you know, we'll see what kind of B2B applications work well for this, but I think you should think of B2C, right? So if you are, uh, you know, working at a company or maybe a consumer, right? Maybe you are constantly like Amazon, right? That's not to pick on one certain company, but, you know, bless up. My wife is always the one, if something happens with Amazon, she's the one that braves, you know, getting on the website and, you know, talking on the phone to 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 different voice agents. I think Amazon is actually okay at this, right? But think of those companies, if it's not your company that could use something like this, think of those companies that you interface with. So I do think this is on the B2C side, but having that data follow you around from whether it is you are online chatting or on the phone and not having to re-explain those things or, you know, what went wrong with an order because presumably it's all gonna be tracked, right? That's the thing that OpenAI says here, you know, talking about how it connects to your own company systems. Uh, so in the same way that, you know, most companies have been rushing to get their data in order. You know, over the past, you know, post-ChatGPT phase when they're like, oh my gosh, all of a sudden we really need to have our data in order for AI systems to be able to read and make use of this, right? This is— this holds true for voice and customer success or customer experience agents as well. So that's a kind of brief overview of what OpenAI is Uh, saying that this is. So it's not a new model. All right. It's just kind of the infrastructure that surrounds their voice models. So every presence agent, according to OpenAI, starts with one narrow job and only the system access that the job needs. So companies set the allowed actions, required approvals, and exact moments that presence should escalate to a human. Right? So you can set that level. Maybe you set it very low. And I would probably recommend that when this does roll out to the masses is, you know, don't set that escalation bar high, especially when you're testing out a new technology in production, right? You have to get it right. And again, I think people always look at maximum autonomy when it comes to trying out new AI, which is the exact wrong way to look at it. You look at your, uh, low stakes, high quantity, uh, uh, instances And then you have to be able to develop a system internally in the same way that I've always encouraged companies to create your own benchmarks, right? But those are text-based benchmarks. Don't just look at artificial analysis. Don't just look at, I don't know, whatever you're looking at, Arena or, you know, Humanity's Last Exam, right? You can't look at a single benchmark for enterprise AI adoption. Those are great starting points, right? But you need to be for text-based or agent kind of agent-based systems, you have to have your own internal text-based benchmarks that say this is what qualifies as a win, this is what qualifies as a loss, these are our guardrails, this is how we deploy this throughout our organization. You have to do the exact same thing for voice agents, which is a little more difficult because there's things like nuance and sarcasm in your voice. So that's one thing and maybe one reason Um, why these voice agents, I think initially when we saw this, this first puff of smoke in 2024 with, oh my gosh, voice AI agents are gonna take over customer service and they, well, they didn't, is because the models weren't even smart enough to get over that big, uh, gray area of, hey, people are ambiguous, right? If someone responds yes, you can say yes, right? That someone's excited about it. If they say yeah, right? That means they're maybe being sarcastic and not actually excited about something. So, Models, for the most part, I think couldn't even get over one of those first big initial humps because the reason why most companies have, right, customer support with real humans is to understand that human nuance. Uh, so if, if, if all the model was doing in 2023, 2024 was essentially translating, uh, your speech to text and then having a model in the background read that text, that's the reason why it just didn't work. Initially, so what OpenAI actually bundles together is what Presence actually is. So they're giving you the policies, the guardrails, approved actions, simulations, and evaluation tools inside of one product. So this is a Codex-powered improvement process that's built directly into the platform. It's not sold separately, and OpenAI's own FDEs, or forward deployed engineers. Connect each company's systems and bring the agent live. So, yeah, we've been talking about this, this FDE, right? You'll see it in our newsletter today, right? But Amazon just, you know, shut down kind of their AGI department or, you know, laid off a bunch of people in their AGI department, and they're focusing more and more resources on FDEs, or, you know, actually deploying, putting their humans inside of these other companies. So it looks like that's what OpenAI's kind of angle is here, right? They already have their FDEs. You know, big companies already have their dedicated OpenAI people working inside there. So this is just one other system that those FDEs, or forward-deployed engineers, will be able to implement for OpenAI customers. So here's the thing you have to talk about. It's getting from Beta, getting from demo to deployment, because that is what is ultimately going to decide whether OpenAI Presence is kind of the next big wave of not just customer service, but maybe where all the other AI players will play versus just, oh, it's a new feature that may or may not pick up steam. So right now, the way that OpenAI frames it is that teams are able to simulate those common requests, edge cases, and higher-risk scenarios before any customer actually sees the agents. So you can set those guardrails, humans can monitor and step in mid-conversation, uh, et cetera. And then after launch, Codex can investigate real production signals and propose updates that teams can actually test before rollout. So now let's try to understand a little bit of what's happening under the hood. And I think this part, especially if you use OpenAI's new GPT Live, and it is bonkers, y'all, it is good. I wanted to do a show on this, right? But in our newsletter for our Wednesday demos, I, I usually have you all vote. Um, I really want to do a show on this because I think GPT Live, that's their new, um, essentially the replacement for Advanced Voice Mode inside of ChatGPT. If you haven't used it, my gosh, it is good. Um, not just being able to understand your data, but you know, I think you can finally experience Talking to an agent and then knowing that it's actually calling tools and looking things up in the background. Whereas before, I think live voice agents, whether it was ChatGPT's advanced voice mode, you know, Gemini Live, those are probably the 2, you know, big consumer versions. It almost seemed like all these voice agents would give you an intentionally ambiguous and vague answer. And you're like, okay, it seems to maybe be looking up something in the background, but maybe not. And it's almost like you couldn't tell. I remember one time I was literally just trying to test, like, you know, like the hallucination or ambiguous rate, uh, with, uh, you know, head-to-head between Gemini Live and, uh, the advanced voice mode with ChatGPT. But regardless, the technology just wasn't good. But I think this last iteration from OpenAI makes it good, and it's multiple models. So first, let's talk about GPT Real-Time 2. Well, technically it's now GPT Real-Time 2.1 because they just came out with an update, but that's essentially The developer tool for building custom voice agents through OpenAI's API. So they essentially have this technology, right? Let's just call it super smart AI voice, right? So if you're a developer and if you want to build with this new super smart AI voice, you would use GPT Realtime 2.1. If you're a consumer and you want to experience it just using your ChatGPT account, that's called GPT Live 1. So both of these are new. In the last 2 weeks. So that powers the new ChatGPT Voice, where you can hold a live conversation while the AI quietly handles harder work off to another model, whether it's calling tools, looking at your data, searching something on the internet, thinking, reasoning in the background about something that would normally take an AI model a little bit longer. Right. The last technical details we, we saw was that they kicked this over to GPT-5.5, and it would think and reason about things while the real-time model kept the conversation going. Uh, so Presence though sits above both. So it's not a new model, right? It sits above both, and OpenAI has not yet revealed, uh, which model actually powers, uh, Presence, although I'm guessing it's probably something on the GPT Real-Time 2 side. That would be my guess. All right, so why do you have to pay attention to this? And I think This is something where I think trust either increases or erodes depending on your experience, right? A, a, a very simple example. I don't, I forgot what the company is, right? But it's, it's either a heating or air conditioning company that I use here in Chicago. They had their voice agents and they're actually tricky at first. The first time I called, I don't know, heater, air conditioner wasn't working very well. And I'm like, wait, this kind of sounds real. And then instantly, obviously being around AI, I knew it was AI and I was having fun trying to, you know, jailbreak it on the phone, that kind of stuff. Um, but it couldn't get human handoff. And that was a bad thing, uh, because ultimately what matters here, it's not about the technology, it's about our consumers', uh, queries being resolved or Not, or are people just more frustrated? But the, the reality is, I think consumers want this. There was actually a study from Five9 that said that 80% of consumers are willing to use AI customer service, right? Yes, I know there's some companies out there that do customer service well, but I would say this is an argue that is literally just, uh, sorry, this is an area that is literally begging to be disrupted because it is so bad. The quality is so slow. And ultimately, I don't know, anytime I have to make a call to customer service, I feel there is no resolution. So maybe this is something I'm personally rooting for, for the industry, right? I'm— I don't let that impact, you know, if, if you're a decision maker at your company, don't let that impact, you know, your decision on whether you should be using these type of voice and real-time agents or not. But regardless, the consumer demand is almost overwhelming, right? You've seen this, whether it has any merit or not, you've seen this recent kind of uprising against AI. And I'm not just talking about AI slop, right? Companies, I think, are deploying sometimes AI in an irresponsible way when it comes to job creation, job growth, things like that. So sometimes there's this kickback against AI, but at least when it comes to the appetite for Uh, deploying real good AI agents. It seems like customer service, right? Consumers want this. So if you are a, a business leader, maybe you haven't even, uh, you, you know, maybe you're in the, in the space where it's like, yeah, we don't even really offer customer service. Well, maybe you probably can. Uh, so that's another thing to, uh, think about. So like I started the show off with, as we wrap here, this was a quiet launch. Which was interesting to me. And Presence, I think, drew so little attention because essentially it's not sexy, right? Enterprise infrastructure doesn't look exciting when it's first launched, but that's what powers this thing. If you don't have the infrastructure set up, this isn't going to be a reality for you. So I think that obviously customer service organizations, they do have the infrastructure, but what about everyone else? What if customer, you know, service or phone service is, you know, not even a top 10 priority for you, but you've always been Offering it. I think customer service though may become AI's kind of first mass consumer disruption, right? Aside from text, that's come and gone. So maybe it's the next big iteration. Yes, we've all seen AI photos and AI videos in advertisements, but I think that's gonna continue to blur the line between what's real and what's not. But I think what is real is that this is a space that is probably likely going to explode. Because like I started with, both OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and even technically Grok, all the players are starting to invest heavily in this space because the technology is finally good enough where this can actually be a customer service tool that is worthwhile and that the users want. But whether that helps customers depends entirely on what companies optimize this first. And if you are just looking for that big red easy button, or if you have the infrastructure and human power to actually deploy this in a responsible way that helps meet that demand. All right, so that's a wrap on what's new with OpenAI Presence. And hey, my kind of hot take, uh, takeaway on this is, like I said, I'm rooting for this, not just for OpenAI Presence, um, I'm rooting for this segment because personally, as a consumer, I have hated customer service for the longest time. I've very rarely had a good experience, and at least according to studies, it seems like that is normal across the board. So in my, uh, in, in my experience, this is something that I think enterprise companies should be looking at. Obviously, if you're already in the B2C space, if you already have dedicated customer support, there's probably a good chance that you have the infrastructure to take advantage of this. So you should be looking at it. But for everyone else, I think this also begs the question, Should we be doing this? Whether it's for, or maybe you're in the B2B space, maybe you are in the B2C space, but you just haven't had kind of a dedicated customer phone or customer chat service, and maybe you should. Or even for larger organizations looking to deploy something like this internally. Right? If you have tens of thousands of employees, being able to give that level of personalization like I was talking about easier, or like I was talking about earlier, where I think companies when they find generative AI, they're like, okay, we can just put out more content that appeals to everyone when I think it's the reverse. You have to ingest those signals, ingest those data points, and you should just be putting out more personalized messaging and more helpful messaging to more people. So maybe that's internally, maybe that's externally, but regardless, I think the technology is finally there and that's exciting. And, well, we'll see if OpenAI Presence gets more eyeballs on it. So that's a wrap for today's show. Thank you for tuning in. If you haven't already, please go to youreverydayai.com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter and make sure to tune in tomorrow. We're gonna be going over our Friday features. There's a lot of new stuff that dropped both, uh, yesterday and that I know is coming today. So you're not gonna wanna miss that one. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'all.

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