Slack CEO Denise Dresser is leaving the firm and joining OpenAI as the firm’s chief income officer, a number of sources inform WIRED. Marc Benioff, the chief govt of Salesforce, which owns Slack, shared information of Dresser’s departure in a message to employees on Monday night.
At OpenAI, Dresser will handle the firm’s enterprise unit, which has been rising quickly this 12 months. She is going to report to chief working officer Brad Lightcap. She begins subsequent week.
“We’re on a path to put AI instruments into the arms of tens of millions of employees, throughout each trade,” stated OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo in an announcement to WIRED. “Denise has led that form of shift before, and her expertise will assist us make AI helpful, dependable, and accessible for companies all over the place.”
Dresser has been at Salesforce for 14 years, in accordance to Benioff’s message. Prior to changing into CEO, she held various govt roles in Salesforce’s enterprise gross sales unit. She was appointed CEO in 2023, after the earlier CEO, Lidiane Jones, departed for the chief govt position at Bumble. (Jones served as Slack’s CEO for a few 12 months.)
The corporate that ultimately grew to become Slack was based in 2009. By 2014 it had develop into a fast-growing software for office chat and collaboration instruments. In 2021, the firm was acquired by Salesforce for practically $28 billion. A lot of the founding employees of Slack, together with cofounders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, left inside a couple of years of the acquisition. Over time, a few of Slack’s operations have been absorbed into the bigger construction of Salesforce, and there have been reports of culture clashes between the staff of the once-small startup and the enterprise behemoth.
Rob Seaman, Slack’s present chief product officer, will develop into interim CEO of Slack, in accordance to two sources with direct information of the govt modifications.
Representatives for Slack hadn’t responded to WIRED’s requests for remark at the time of publication.
In Dresser’s tenure as Slack’s CEO, she oversaw the rollout of a number of giant scale AI options, together with AI-generated assembly summaries and an integration with Salesforce’s AI brokers. Earlier this 12 months, when Elon Musk took on a distinguished position in the US authorities, Dresser sometimes took to X to present assist, saying she agreed that federal staff needs to be required to ship bullet-pointed emails about what they’ve completed, and sending a “thumbs up” emoji to a publish about President Donald Trump signing an govt order mandating federal companies to work with Musk’s DOGE.
Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff contributed to this report.
Replace: 12/9/2025, 2 PM EDT: WIRED has corrected how lengthy Dresser was employed by Slack and Salesforce.
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