OpenAI Hires Slack CEO as New Chief Revenue Officer

Denise, CEO of Slack Dresser is leaving the company and joining OpenAI as the company’s chief revenue officer, multiple sources told WIRED. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, which owns Slack, announced Dresser’s departure in a message to staff Monday evening.

At OpenAI, Dresser will lead 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 the path to putting AI tools in the hands of millions of workers, across all industries,” said Fidji Simo, CEO of OpenAI Applications, in a statement to WIRED. “Denise has led this kind of change before, and her experience will help us make AI useful, reliable and accessible to businesses around the world. »

Dresser has worked at Salesforce for 14 years, according to Benioff’s post. Before becoming CEO, she held several leadership roles within Salesforce’s enterprise sales unit. She was named CEO in 2023, after previous CEO Lidiane Jones left for the general manager role at Bumble. (Jones was CEO of Slack for about a year.)

The company that eventually became Slack was founded in 2009. By 2014, it had become a fast-growing app for workplace chat and collaboration tools. In 2021, the company was acquired by Salesforce for almost $28 billion. Much of Slack’s founding team, including co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, left the company within a few years of the acquisition. Over time, some of Slack’s operations were absorbed into the larger Salesforce structure, and there were reported cultural clashes between employees of the small startup and the corporate giant.

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

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

During Dresser’s tenure as CEO of Slack, she oversaw the deployment of several large-scale AI features, including AI-generated meeting summaries and an integration with Salesforce AI agents. Earlier this year, when Elon Musk took on a senior role in the U.S. government, Dresser occasionally turned to

Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff contributed to this report.

Updated: 9/12/2025, 2:00 p.m. EDT: WIRED has corrected the length of time Dresser was employed by Slack and Salesforce.