🍭 OpenAI Built A Consulting Firm 🎯

Good morning. OpenAI just launched a product that looks a lot like a consulting firm, engineers included.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• OpenAI quietly built itself a consulting arm and called it Presence

• Anthropic's Fable is the reason why the White House is threatening sanctions

• Microsoft and Mistral are giving Europe an AI Washington doesn't control

OpenAI's
👨‍💼 Now Competes With Its Consultants

The Bite:

OpenAI launched Presence, an enterprise platform for deploying AI voice and chat agents.

The product packages company policies, guardrails, evaluations, and a Codex-powered improvement loop into one deployment framework.

Deployments are led by OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers and select systems integrators, not self-serve.

Presence already runs OpenAI's own English-language phone support line, resolving most inbound calls without a human.

BBVA, SoftBank, and IAG are named early enterprise adopters, each still in limited testing.

Snacks:

• Presence's Codex-powered improvement loop cut human handoffs by 15 percentage points in 10 days.

• The product runs live on 1-888-GPT-0090, OpenAI's own support line.

• BBVA is testing Spanish-language voice support for everyday banking in Mexico.

• SoftBank rated the agent's Japanese-language conversations highly for natural, accurate quality.

• IAG plans to use Presence for claims support during severe weather events.

• Presence grew out of OpenAI's Deployment Company, a $4 billion venture launched in May.

Why it Bites:

OpenAI just absorbed a layer of the AI value chain that used to belong to consulting firms.

The model is now the easy part.

Getting an agent to behave reliably inside a bank's billing system, with the right guardrails and escalation rules, is the actual bottleneck between a demo and a deployed product.

That's the job Accenture and Deloitte have been billing hours for over the past two years. It's also the job OpenAI just decided to do itself, sending its own Forward Deployed Engineers instead of handing the account to a systems integrator.

The three launch partners make the pattern clear.

BBVA, SoftBank, and IAG aren't testing a chatbot. They're testing whether OpenAI can walk them through a job consultancies used to own, then keep the account once the pilot works.

Deployment was supposed to be the opportunity consulting firms inherited from the AI boom.

OpenAI just told them it's keeping it.

Steal This Prompt
✏️ Industrial Design But Make It Look Expensive

Turn a half-baked product idea into sleek industrial concept art that looks like it escaped a $200K design agency deck.

Use it to:

• Brainstorm product ideas before prototyping

• Mock up futuristic hardware or consumer tech

• Make your startup idea look suspiciously fundable

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Industrial Concept Design 

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the #s with your idea/concept and details

4. Watch it cook: suddenly your thought has industrial designer energy

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

📝 Prosed

Feeds years of newsletters, podcasts, and LinkedIn posts into a pipeline that assembles a publish-ready manuscript that still sounds like you, not AI slop.

🗂️ Fluree

A verifiable knowledge graph database that gives AI agents one immutable source of truth instead of a hallucinated patchwork of company data.

🔧 HarnessRouter

One API drops Codex, Claude Code, and Hermes into your product as sandboxed agents, skipping the months of orchestration and retry logic most teams build from scratch.

⚙️ Freesolo Flash

Trains a small, task-specific model with upfront pricing and GPU costs cut up to 8x, turning RL fine-tuning from a research team's project into anyone's.

🔍 YC has it

Describes your problem in plain English and returns the YC startups that actually solve it, translated out of marketing speak with pricing and integrations attached.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

⚖️ Treasury Threatens Sanctions Over Fable Distillation Claim
→ Treasury Secretary Bessent threatened sanctions and Entity List designations after White House officials accused Moonshot AI of covertly distilling Anthropic's Fable model to build Kimi K3.

🤝 Microsoft And Mistral Expand AI Partnership
→ Microsoft committed billions to fund Mistral's European GPU infrastructure while adding Mistral's Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 models to Microsoft Foundry.

🤖 OpenAI Launches Presence For Enterprise AI Agents
→ The new platform, deployed with OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineers, already resolves 75% of the company's own English-language support calls without human help.

🦾 Kalanick's Atoms Raises $1.7B For Robotics
→ Andreessen Horowitz led the round for Travis Kalanick's robotics startup, with Uber also joining as an investor and Ben Horowitz taking a board seat.

🏗️ OpenAI Plans $30B Data Center In Georgia
→ Project Camellia will draw 3.2 gigawatts of power near Savannah in phases through 2032, with OpenAI pledging $80 million in community benefits.