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OpenAI Presence

openai.com

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Re: OpenAI Presence

#11

Post by AlwaysRock »

sauercrowd wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: OpenAI Presence

#12

Post by cheschire »

sauercrowd wrote: post #3

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.

They probably have a “low hanging fruit” agent that makes pitches to them during weekly update meetings based on potential ROI

Re: OpenAI Presence

#13

Post by skybrian »

tolugenius wrote: post #5

> 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?

Maybe they don’t have a lot of in-house expertise and they would rather outsource? It will depend on whether they trust OpenAI to do a good job versus some other vendor versus doing it in-house.

Re: OpenAI Presence

#14

Post by dang »

Catloafdev wrote: post #7

It's so full of bullshit marketing prose I don't even know what it actually is.

They're usually pretty good (as is Anthropic) about not generating their own writing. I wonder what was different here.

Re: OpenAI Presence

#16

Post by skybrian »

> 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?

Re: OpenAI Presence

#17

Post by SimianSci »

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.

Re: OpenAI Presence

#18

Post by SimianSci »

sailfast wrote: post #2

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.

> 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.

Re: OpenAI Presence

#19

Post by olucas »

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"?

Re: OpenAI Presence

#20

Post by tolugenius »

skybrian wrote: post #13
tolugenius wrote: post #5

> 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?

Maybe they don’t have a lot of in-house expertise and they would rather outsource? It will depend on whether they trust OpenAI to do a good job versus some other vendor versus doing it in-house.

I suppose, although the trust is doing a lot of work, not just in "can this work as I want today" but "can this consistently work for the next x years" which is a very different problem to solve for. But we'll have to see the roll out on this.
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