OpenAI announced Tuesday that it has appointed Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its new chief revenue officer, marking one of the most high-profile executive moves in the AI industry this year.
In her new role, Dresser will lead OpenAI’s global revenue strategy, overseeing customer success and enterprise operations, the company said in a statement.
Dresser spent more than a decade at Salesforce before taking over as Slack’s CEO in 2023. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020 for $27.7 billion, one of the largest software acquisitions in the company’s history.
“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.
OpenAI has been expanding rapidly since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, which helped ignite the generative AI boom. While the company has not publicly disclosed audited financials, some internal projections and industry analyses suggest OpenAI could be approaching tens of billions in annualized revenue, though these figures remain unverified. Likewise, speculation about the company pursuing hundreds of billions in annual sales by 2030 has circulated among analysts but is not based on confirmed company guidance.
Reports have also referenced extremely high infrastructure spending requirements tied to AI model training and deployment. Some external commentary has floated estimates as high as $1.4 trillion in long-term compute and data center commitments, though these numbers are not supported by major public filings and should be treated as speculative.
Despite the uncertainty around OpenAI’s actual financial trajectory, the company continues to experience surging demand. OpenAI says ChatGPT now serves more than 800 million weekly users and supports over 1 million business customers, making enterprise adoption a key focus for its next phase of growth.
Dresser’s appointment signals OpenAI’s push to expand deeper into the enterprise market.
“We’re on a path to put AI tools into the hands of millions of workers across every industry,” said Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications. “Denise has led that kind of shift before, and her experience will help us make AI useful, reliable, and accessible for businesses everywhere.”