OpenAI Appoints Former Slack CEO as Chief Revenue Officer

OpenAI has appointed former Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its chief revenue officer.

In this role, Dresser will oversee the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s global revenue strategy across enterprise and customer success and will “help more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations,” OpenAI said in a Tuesday (Dec. 9) blog post.

“We’re on a path to put AI tools into the hands of millions of workers, across every industry,” Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, said in the post. “Denise has led that kind of shift before, and her experience will help us make AI useful, reliable and accessible for businesses everywhere.”

At Slack, Dresser led the company through its integration with Salesforce, according to the post.

Before that, Dresser was with Salesforce for more than a decade, building and leading global sales organizations, per the post.

Dresser joins OpenAI at a time when companies are looking to implement AI across their organization and have it power their most important processes and applications, the post said.

“I’ve spent my career helping scale category-defining platforms, and I’m looking forward to bringing that experience to OpenAI as it enters its next phase of enterprise transformation,” Dresser said in the post.

OpenAI said in November that its number of business customers around the world had topped 1 million.

The company said that figure “includes all organizations that actively pay OpenAI for business use — either through ChatGPT for Work, or through direct consumption of our models through our developer platform.”

“Our enterprise momentum is fueled in part by consumer adoption,” OpenAI said in a Nov. 5 blog post. “With more than 800 million weekly users already familiar with ChatGPT, adoption and ROI within businesses is realized more rapidly — pilots are shorter and rollouts face less friction.”

In the same blog post, OpenAI cited a recent study from Wharton that found that 75% of enterprises saw a positive return on investment from AI, while under 5% report a negative return.

“While there are many studies on this topic, this one reflects what we see on the ground today with our customers: when AI is deployed with the right use case and infrastructure, teams see real results,” the company said.

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