According to TechCrunch, OpenAI is hiring Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its new chief revenue officer, a role where she’ll be responsible for the company’s revenue strategy for enterprise and customer success. The news was first reported by Wired and confirmed by OpenAI in a blog post. Dresser is leaving after more than 14 years at Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, where she oversaw the introduction of several AI features at the collaboration platform. OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, stated Dresser’s experience will help make AI “useful, reliable, and accessible for businesses everywhere.” Meanwhile, Slack’s chief product officer, Rob Seaman, will become the company’s interim CEO following Dresser’s departure.
OpenAI’s Profit Push
Here’s the thing: this hire is a massive signal of intent. OpenAI has incredible tech, but it’s burning cash at a legendary rate. The board and investors are almost certainly demanding a clearer, faster path to profitability. And who better to lead that charge than someone who just spent over a decade inside Salesforce, the absolute master of enterprise software sales? Dresser isn’t just a sales exec; she’s been steeped in the culture of selling to big businesses and understands how to embed products into massive organizations. Her job won’t just be to sell API credits. It’ll be to build the entire revenue engine—pricing, packaging, support, the whole shebang—for a company that’s trying to mature from a research lab into a sustainable business. That’s a tall order.
The New Braintrust
Look at the pattern forming. Fidji Simo, the CEO of Applications who made the statement about Dresser, joined OpenAI earlier this year from Instacart. Now they’ve got the CEO of Slack. This is a deliberate assembly of executives who have scaled major, user-facing platforms. It tells you exactly where OpenAI’s head is at. The research is (mostly) done. The models are built. Now comes the hard part: productization and monetization at a global scale. They’re bringing in people who have done that before, in the messy, real world of quarterly results and customer complaints. It’s a smart play, but it also highlights a potential cultural shift. Can a company built by researchers smoothly integrate a leadership team focused squarely on revenue? That’s the billion-dollar question.
What It Means For Everyone Else
For enterprise customers, this is probably good news. A stronger, more professional revenue and customer success org at OpenAI means better support, clearer contracts, and more robust enterprise features. But it also almost certainly means prices will firm up and maybe even increase as they move away from exploratory pricing. For competitors like Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft, this is a shot across the bow. OpenAI is getting serious about locking down the enterprise market, and they’re hiring the generals to do it. And for Slack? Well, losing your CEO to a key partner—and a company Salesforce has invested heavily in—is awkward, to say the least. It shows where the real talent sees the momentum and opportunity right now. It’s all in AI.
