The news: OpenAI launched OpenAI Presence, its latest corporate software product that can automate customer support, sales, billing workflows, insurance claims, and IT requests. It gives the company a new revenue stream and is OpenAI’s biggest move beyond AI models, per Business Insider.

Presence’s subscription costs are negotiated per deployment and scoped with sales engineers to fit each company’s data and workflows, per The Register. Custom pricing and direct sales support show OpenAI is positioning itself as a solutions partner rather than a commodity provider.

Zooming in: OpenAI built Presence to counter the market reality that AI models are becoming interchangeable and less expensive.

• Chinese startup Moonshot released Kimi K3, an open-source model that beats Anthropic and OpenAI releases on several benchmarks, per LiveBench, intensifying cost competition.
• US rivals including Anthropic, Google, and Meta offer capable models with shrinking price tags. 

Presence shifts the company toward enterprise services, where contracts last years, not months. The product requires hands-on deployment with OpenAI engineers—a deliberate move to embed the company deeper inside client operations. Custom evaluation creates switching costs and results in long-term lock-in that will be harder to untangle than simply quitting a subscription. 

Early adopters will likely be regulated industries where compliance and audit trails outweigh price flexibility. Most businesses might not see a need for an OpenAI-managed agentic OS.

Implications for brands: Businesses are now facing a fork in the road between standalone models or managed services like OpenAI’s Presence and Anthropic's Enterprise AI Services.

Brands should require OpenAI to provide granular cost-per-resolution metrics, not just token counts. Assign a dedicated internal owner for policy guardrails, because brand voice and compliance sit inside those rules.

For most CMOs, the safe bet is building agent orchestration layers that remain model-agnostic, using Presence as one option, not the sole backbone. 

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