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Slack CEO Denise Dresser is leaving the company to become
Open AI's chief revenue officer. Now, what does that move tell us
about Open AI's push into the enterprise?
And how will Slack manage the handoff at the top?
After the break, I'll explain what Dresser will run inside
Open AI, how our Salesforce and Slack track record lines up with
that mandate, and what we know about Slack's interim
leadership. I'll add context on Slack's path
from start up to a Salesforce business unit, then outline the
likely first steps for Open A is new revenue chief, so you can
read the next press release with more of your mind and less
signal and less guesswork. Wired reports that Denise
Dresser will join Open AI as Chief Revenue Officer after
serving as SLAC's CEOA staff. Memo went out from Salesforce
Chief Executive Marc Benioff confirming her departure, and
the story says she starts her new rule next week.
And with that, we move from boomer to an on the record
leadership change in a concrete start date.
Now Open AI is placing dresser over its enterprise unit, which
has been growing rapidly. And she'll report to Chief
Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. That reporting line clarifies
where revenue, operations, enterprise sales meet inside of
Open AIACRO, tied directly to the COO, signals a focus on
execution customer delivery in the systems that support the
sales cycle. Now.
The near term read is very simple, though.
Open EI wants disciplined enterprise growth and
accountability for its leadership.
You know Dresser arrives with long tenure in enterprise sales
and go to market roles. According to sources, she spent
about 14 years at Salesforce before becoming Slack CEO in
2023. And that's after Lydiane Jones
left to run Bumble. Now that sequence that is
important because it shows a career built around selling and
scaling software to large organizations.
Not only running a product team, but running a large team.
Now the background fits Acro role seat that touches field
sales, customer success, partner deals and post sale adoption.
A Slack will be LED an an interim basis by Rob Seaman, its
chief product officer, while the company and Salesforce manage
the transition. I think it's Slack, a leader who
already owns the road map and feature delivery, which helps
steady day-to-day decisions while the board and the parent
company evaluate next steps. And interim arrangement also
keeps the door open for internal and external candidates without
forcing an immediate, permanent pick.
Now, Slack did not comment. We tried to reach them, but they
didn't talk to us. So to understand the weight of
this hand off, recall the arc of Slack itself.
Slack traces its roost back to 2009 to late 2008, 2009, and it
took off by 2014 as a workplace chat collaboration tool.
Now, Salesforce acquired the company in 2021 for nearly $28
billion, and over time, more of SLAC's operations integrated
into Salesforce. Founders and early leaders,
including Stewart Butterfield and Kyle Henderson, departed in
the years after the acquisition after they got a huge money bank
account addition, which often happens when a startup becomes
part of a larger enterprise. Now, Wired also points to
reporting about culture friction between Slack, startup DNA and
Salesforce's scale. And that friction gives context
to how leadership shifts land inside a combined organization.
But a parent company absorbs operations from a smaller
company. Product and policy choices can
move into different directions, different cadences, and interim
leadership can be a practical tool to collaborate those
cadences. Usually what happens is the
smaller company gets acquired and then either they a get
melded into the larger company or they just get shut down.
Luckily if I mean, if you're a Slack user, but it might not be
luckily for you and maybe you don't like it and most people
don't that I've talked to, they're just like, I don't want
to hear another Slack notification ever again in my
life if it's possible. Same with Jira, Nobody likes
that. But with this new set up, you
know a public road map help customers make sense of it.
So let's shift over to Open AI again and what ACRO can drive in
a year when enterprise demand grows up.
Now Dresser's remit is making AI useful and reliable for
businesses across industries. Paraphrasing a statement from
Open AI leadership that translates into clear
priorities, stable pricing and packaging, predictable support,
measurable rollout timelines, any path for large customers to
pilot, expand, standardize. SARR ties those motions to
revenue targets and retention. So Open AI has to be worried
about Google right now. Google owns your enterprise.
They own basically every part of your system.
E-mail, chat, they have conferencing, all the Google Doc
stuff, It's all there. And you know what?
Open AI just wants a small chunk of that.
Google is very competitive. They already have all your
information. They have all the systems in
place to just add AI, just add Gemini to everything, right?
And then they have the the backbone to a either wipe out
open AI immediately. I don't think they're going to
do that. I think people will continue to
subsidize open AI with more money.
Over time, Open AI will eventually start making money,
more money because the CRO coming in, they're working on
the business part of it. Can they do things better than
Google? It's tough to tough to feel that
out right now. It's still the very early 80s.
It's like the beginning of the Internet with Netscape Navigator
and Internet Explorer and also Opera.
Do you remember Opera, I think still around.
And what was the one Mosaic? Mosaic was great.
I remember those times and even in the terminal, we used to
search in the terminal and like type in things.
There was servers you can connect to and you could find
documents in like just the terminal window.
It's crazy. And now of course, you can watch
full movies anytime you want to on your phone.
So it's like that when Google is the big player now.
It used to be IBM back in the day.
Microsoft came out of nowhere, took him out.
Open AI could be the next player to take out Google, possibly.
And that's why Google's kind of afraid.
But they jumped on it with Gemini.
Now, Slack isn't really an AI program, you know, It's not an
app that's touted as an AI first application.
But Dresser's recent work at Slack included rolling out large
scale AI features such as AI generated meeting summaries and
integrations with Salesforce's AI agents.
That experience lines up with enterprise buyers who now expect
concrete productivity gains and not just a chatbot.
It also means she has navigated the governance, security, and
procurement steps that big customers require.
Dresser is all about the money, that's why they got her on and
for a hefty price. So if she can turn this around
and if she can make open AIA Enterprise player, even though
you know some people already use open AI for enterprise, don't
blame them for it. I could see why some companies
would jump over to Google because if they already use the
Google suite, they may as well use the Gemini suite with the
Google Suite and it's just can go hand in hand now.
And I love it. I love the invention of chat
bots and I love that things that used to take copy and pasting
into ChatGPT to get a summary. So say if somebody emailed me,
right? So like right when the ChatGPT
came out, somebody would e-mail me, a client would e-mail me and
I would send it over to ChatGPT. I would paste it in there and
say can you summarize this e-mail for me?
OK, super simple. And it would summarize the
e-mail and I'm like OK cool. Like give give me like 4 bullet
points and it would do that. And I'm like oh, is this worth
it for me to check this out? Sometimes it would be, sometimes
it wouldn't be. But I without that step now
because Gemini's there, it's all integrated.
I don't have to do that anymore. What's the summary of this
e-mail? Let me know if the email's, you
know, 4 paragraphs long. I don't want to read the whole
thing. I need a summary so I can
quickly make a decision if I want to read the whole thing.
Now, if I do, that's great. Gemini can tell me is it worth
it? Yes.
Now Dresser's going to be starting soon.
Our start date is compressing the onboarding curve few weeks.
She's starting next week and suggests that Open AI plans to
plug her right into an existing enterprise machine and have her
lead without a long runway. She already knows how to do
this. She's going to step in here and
she's going to be able to kill it.
Now that puts early emphasis on pipeline health, top accounts
and any quarter end commitments already in flight.
So anything that's on the table, the dresser's going to step
right in, take care of it. And a swift internal tour with
product, trust, security and support leaders would come
first. Of course, she's probably
already meeting those people behind the scenes, followed by
meetings with anchor customers and partners.
Just to get to know everybody the first first week or two, get
to know everybody. Start doing some business now.
Brad Lightcap is worth underlining here.
Acro under the CEO aligns revenue with operations and
delivery, not only with marketing or finance.
Now that set up gives the CROA direct handle on how promises
turn into deployments, which is the core friction in enterprise
AI. If a customer outcome lags, the
escalation path is already inside operation, which shortens
the loop from problem to fix. Now I want to ask you for one
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No doubt about it. So here's the short wrap of this
episode. Slack's EO Denise Dresser will
become open AI's chief revenue officer starting next week.
She'll run the enterprise unit report to CEO Brad Lightcap, and
bring long expertise from Salesforce and Slack, including
recent AI feature rollouts. Slack name's chief product
officer Rob Seaman as interim CEO while the company manages
this transition support. If you could take a second and
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