Slack’s CEO is joining OpenAI to find the money to pay for all those data centers
OpenAI announced that Denise Dresser, the current CEO of Slack, will be the company’s new chief revenue officer. Dresser will oversee the company’s revenue strategy “through business and customer success,” according to OpenAI’s announcement, and will likely play a key role in leading the company toward profitability now that it is reorganized as a public benefit corporation.
“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 Products, in the announcement. “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.”
Simo joined OpenAI in May of this year, after serving as CEO of Instacart and, before that, head of Facebook at Meta. The hiring of Simo and Dresser could be a good indication of how OpenAI plans to approach ChatGPT in the future. That is, the company is taking a very Silicon Valley approach to growing its chatbot business and focusing on scaling and monetizing as many AI interactions as possible. It’s no mistake that Simo helped establish Meta’s advertising business and OpenAI reportedly intends to introduce ads into chats with its AI models.
Even with the possibility of advertising revenue, Dresser will still have to overcome what OpenAI continues to spend to offer its various AI products. OpenAI funds several partnerships for access to data centers and commits to purchasing and building server components for these data centers. Add to that the cost of simply processing a ChatGPT request itself, and increasing the company’s revenue seems like a tall order.
