https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-presence/
Read the linked article.
For the sake of all our sanity I hope this is a good product that can solve real problems without being a ten minute barrier to getting to a human.
AI support has been terrible so far in my experience and tends to over optimize for a happy path easily solved on a company website rather than solve the issue that made me call them on the phone that is likely a system bug or other issue.
I’m pretty impressed how openai is both extremly verticalized but also building products across the whole depth of that stack.
Not sure if they’re just trying to find what the abstractions are worth focusing, or if it will stay that way, but certainly cool to see how much they’re trying out.
Marketing departament went ahead and drop “battle-tested product” nobody ever battle tested.
They could be using it in the US-Iran war.
We’re introducing OpenAI Presence, a battle-tested product > Proven through years of working with customers at enterprise-scale
I don’t want to laugh too hard this afternoon. But more seriously, I’m not really sure who this product is for in a way an existing tool can’t handle? Like if a business really wants to go deep on agentic workflows for customer service, what is going to make them reach for this?
It’s so full of bullshit marketing prose I don’t even know what it actually is.
Will the Presence also hack its way out of its sandbox and into a 3rd party’s system if it decides it needs to?
They probably have a “low hanging fruit” agent that makes pitches to them during weekly update meetings based on potential ROI
How many PM’s have they got? Each one justifies his or her existence.
It certainly feels like they are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
Makes sense to me. The cost of shipping products is lower than ever and they have lots of talented folks who want to ship things. No one knows what could be the next killer app.
If I have to interact with this or a similar system to do business with you, if possible, I will simply stop doing business with you.
Maybe this is the thing that battled Huggingface. Good luck to anyone who deploys it.
They’re usually pretty good (as is Anthropic) about not generating their own writing. I wonder what was different here.
Presence powers OpenAI’s English-language phone support channel at 1-888-GPT‑0090
That’s the first I’ve heard of it. Has anyone tried it?
This article was incredibly hard to parse before I eventually realized they built a virtual support agent. The unintended consequence being that now im more cautious than ever to trust OpenAI to write marketing prose.
Otherwise, I see this as potentially useful for firms that dont have global pressence and want to service a support system across multiple timezones where it might be difficult to staff a night-shift. However, issues of trust and quality will always be something to contend with here.
to over optimize for a happy path easily solved on a company website rather than solve the issue that made me call them
This issue you mentioned of the in-built sycophancy being at odds with the customer service path, is the same reason I cant trust these sorts of systems in my own environment. I see the value of having a human staff the position of customer service being that they can often delineate the line between “good acceptable service” and “violates company policy” much more keenly than what ive seen from LLMs.
I wonder if this is really the best timing to release a new product. Why would an enterprise customer choose an OpenAI solution when it’s all over the news one of their agents “went rogue”?
is OpenAI willing to have hire engineers & solutions architects work hand in hand with F500 companies for this to be possible ?
or again it’s simply OpenAI looking for PMF to justify their valuations ?
I think it’s the latter and will fail again just like Sora.
it has 20 years experience us claude code no worries