According to The Verge, OpenAI has hired Slack CEO Denise Dresser to serve as its new chief revenue officer, a major move announced on Tuesday. Dresser, who became CEO of Slack in 2023 after 12 years at its parent company Salesforce, will oversee OpenAI’s global revenue strategy. Her immediate task is to help “more businesses put AI to work,” as the company claims over 1 million business customers are already using its tools, with 800 million people using ChatGPT weekly. Rob Seaman, Salesforce’s chief product officer, will step in as Slack’s interim CEO. This hire follows OpenAI’s recent for-profit restructuring and a series of enterprise-focused launches, like an October tool for searching workspace data with ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s Obvious Enterprise Pivot
Look, this isn’t subtle. Hiring the CEO of one of the world’s most ubiquitous workplace communication platforms is a giant, flashing neon sign about where OpenAI sees its next phase of growth. It’s not about more consumer ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. It’s about embedding AI into the daily workflows of massive companies. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, said they want to put AI tools “in the hands of millions of workers, across every industry.” Who better to help with that than someone who just spent over a decade at Salesforce and ran Slack?
Here’s the thing: OpenAI has the tech, but it needs the sales and distribution machine. And that’s what Dresser represents. She oversaw Slack’s own AI feature rollouts, like channel recaps and the Slackbot AI assistant. She knows how to sell productivity and collaboration software to CIOs and IT departments. That’s a completely different game than building a cool consumer chatbot. OpenAI’s announcement last month about 1 million business customers was a flex, but now they’re bringing in the heavy artillery to scale that number exponentially.
What This Means For The AI Race
So what does this tell us? The “platform war” for enterprise AI is officially in full swing, and it’s getting brutally competitive. OpenAI is no longer just a research lab or a consumer app company. With a chief revenue officer of this caliber, they are structuring themselves like a traditional enterprise software giant. They’re going head-to-head with Microsoft (their own investor and partner, awkwardly), Google, Amazon, and a slew of startups all vying for corporate budgets.
And let’s talk about that “for-profit” restructuring. This hire makes that move crystal clear. They need to generate serious, predictable revenue. Enterprise contracts are the golden ticket for that. It’s a shift from “look at our cool model” to “here’s our quarterly sales targets.” The pressure is on. Can they translate their technological lead into a durable business moat? I think this is their biggest bet yet.
