OpenAI Is Selling Presence Like a Consultancy — No Self-Serve Tier, No Public Pricing, FDEs Attached

The Register (corroborated by VentureBeat and artificialintelligence-news)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Presence, launched July 22, ships with no self-serve tier and no published pricing; OpenAI says deployments are 'scoped individually' and led by its own Forward Deployed Engineers plus select global systems integrators, drawing on the OpenAI Deployment Company subsidiary formed in May with $4B backing at a $10B valuation. The proof point OpenAI cites is its own English-language phone support line, where Presence resolves 75% of inbound calls without a human. The structural consequence: every CCaaS vendor and conversational-AI platform monetizing guardrails, policy logic and integration on top of OpenAI models now competes with its own model supplier — and on services margins, not software margins.