OpenAI appoints former Slack CEO Denise Dresser to lead global revenue strategy

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it has appointed Slack chief executive Denise Dresser as its chief revenue officer.

Dresser will be responsible for the artificial‑intelligence company’s global revenue strategy, overseeing both customer success and enterprise segments.

After more than a decade in senior roles at Salesforce, Dresser was named CEO of Slack in 2023, the messaging platform that Salesforce acquired for over $27 billion in 2020.

“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 a statement.

OpenAI sparked the generative‑AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago and has since become one of the fastest‑growing commercial entities on the planet.

The company reported in November that it is on track to exceed $20 billion in annualized revenue run‑rate this year, with a long‑term vision of reaching hundreds of billions of dollars in sales by 2030.

Competitive pressure is intensifying. Google’s AI division and Anthropic are both accelerating product launches and pricing strategies that challenge OpenAI’s market share. In response, OpenAI has secured more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments to scale its models, a level of spending that has sparked debate about the sustainability of the current AI investment wave.

ChatGPT now sees more than 800 million weekly users, and the firm supports over one million business customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Dresser’s mandate will be to deepen those enterprise relationships, helping companies embed AI into core workflows and operational processes.

“We’re on a path to put AI tools into the hands of millions of workers, across every industry,” said Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s senior vice president 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.”

Analysts see Dresser’s appointment as a signal that OpenAI is moving beyond a consumer‑focused model toward a more diversified, enterprise‑centric revenue mix. The company’s recent pricing reforms—tiered usage plans, volume‑based discounts, and tailored API contracts—are designed to lock in larger corporate accounts and reduce churn.

From a technical standpoint, OpenAI is investing heavily in custom silicon, data‑center optimization, and low‑latency inference pipelines to meet the performance expectations of mission‑critical applications. These infrastructure upgrades are expected to lower the cost per token, a key metric for enterprise adoption, while also expanding the capacity needed for upcoming multimodal models.

Market observers caution that the $1.4 trillion infrastructure spend must translate into measurable product differentiation. Competitors are closing the gap on model quality and pricing, and regulatory scrutiny around AI safety and data privacy could impose additional compliance costs.

Nevertheless, OpenAI’s brand equity, developer ecosystem, and early mover advantage in conversational AI provide a strong foundation. With Dresser’s proven track record of scaling SaaS platforms, the firm is positioned to accelerate its go‑to‑market execution and capture a larger slice of the projected $500 billion enterprise AI market by the end of the decade.