OpenAI Launches Presence, an Enterprise Agent Platform

OpenAI launched Presence, an enterprise platform for deploying voice and chat agents, per the company's announcement. That puts OpenAI directly against Sierra, Decagon, and the agent layers Salesforce and ServiceNow already sell into enterprise accounts.

Sierra and Decagon sell agent deployments to enterprises. Salesforce and ServiceNow ship agent tools inside the CRM and ITSM platforms companies already pay for. Presence puts OpenAI in that same market, competing directly with all four rather than staying one layer down as the model provider.

I've seen this pattern before in infrastructure. A platform ships the primitive. Startups build a business on the layer above it. Then the platform ships its own version of that layer. Same pattern, new label. Presence looks like that third step, and I doubt it stops at voice and chat agents.

Building on top of a model API in a category a big lab could package? Assume they'll ship it themselves. Watch whether Sierra and Decagon respond by competing on service and integration instead of the agent itself. Or watch if they move into categories OpenAI has no reason to package.