OpenAI announces Denise Dresser as new chief revenue officer

This year, the chief revenue officer went from beta testing to full launch. The likes of Vijay Vachani at Pipe and Gregg Zegras at Cart.com were just two executives appointed to align teams, optimize tech, and push the levers of revenue generation company wide. Well, we’re ending the year with another blockbuster appointment: OpenAI has announced that Slack CEO Denise Dresser will become its first CRO, in a move that puts an evolving C-suite role under the brightest of spotlights.

Dresser will leave her post as CEO of Salesforce-owned Slack, a role she has held since late 2023. (Marc Benioff’s company bought the work communications platform in 2020 for $27.7 billion.) Although Dresser has worked in the revenue organization for much of her career—most prominently at Salesforce—this will be her first go-around as CRO.

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

Putting someone in charge of marshalling all revenue generating levers should be a no-brainer for a company that refers to itself as “the fastest-growing business platform in history,” and yet still doesn’t make a profit. The appointment comes at a crucial time of course: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman raised eyebrows with his declaration of “code red” in early December, amid heightened competition from the likes of Google.

The scale and scope of the business has been one of the most striking stories of the past year. At the time of writing, a $1 billion Disney investment hardly seems like big news anymore for a company that signed around $1 trillion of tech deals this year (including some major partnerships with the likes of Oracle, AMD and Nvidia). The challenge for Dresser will be to calm the nerves of business leaders who have become antsy with the return on AI investment they’ve seen so far. This seems to be an obstacle the newly-minted CRO is eager to approach.

“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 release. Word to the wise, it might be best for the new CRO to find her feet before reading this piece.