OpenAI appoints Slack CEO as new chief revenue officer

Slack CEO Dennis Dresser is leaving the company Obi roof As the company’s chief revenue officer, multiple sources told WIRED. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Which owns Slackshared news of Dresser’s departure in a letter to employees Monday evening.

At OpenAI, Dresser will run the company’s enterprise unit, which has seen rapid growth this year. She will report to Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. It starts next week.

“We are on our way to putting AI tools in the hands of millions of workers, across every industry,” OpenAI said. Chief Applications Officer Fidji Simo In a statement to WIRED. “Denise has led this kind of transformation before, and her expertise will help us make AI useful, reliable and accessible to businesses everywhere.”

Dresser has been at Slack for 14 years, according to Benioff’s message. Before becoming CEO, she held a number of executive roles in Salesforce’s enterprise sales unit. She was appointed CEO in 2023, after the previous CEO, Lidiane Jones, left to take up the CEO role at Bumble. (Jones served as CEO of Slack for about a year.)

The company that later became Slack was founded in 2009. By 2014, it had become a fast-growing application for workplace chat and collaboration tools. In 2021, Salesforce acquired the company for approximately $28 billion. Much of Slack’s founding employees, including founders Stuart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, left within a few years of the acquisition. Over time, some of Slack’s operations were absorbed into the larger Salesforce structure, and there it was Reports of cultural conflicts Between the employees of a small startup and a giant corporation.

Rob Seaman, Slack’s current chief product officer, will become Slack’s interim CEO, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the executive shake-up.

Slack representatives did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment at the time of publication.

During Dresser’s tenure as CEO of Slack, she oversaw the rollout of several large-scale AI features, including AI-generated meeting summaries and integration with Salesforce’s AI agents. Earlier this year, as Elon Musk took on a more prominent role in the US government, Dresser would occasionally turn to

Paresh Dave and Maxwell Ziv contributed to this report.