Slack CEO Denise Dresser is leaving the corporate and becoming a member of OpenAI as the corporate’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 corporate’s enterprise unit, which has been rising quickly this yr. She is going to report back to chief working officer Brad Lightcap. She begins subsequent week.
“We’re on a path to place AI instruments into the fingers of thousands and thousands of employees, throughout each trade,” mentioned OpenAI CEO of Functions Fidji Simo in a press release to WIRED. “Denise has led that form of shift earlier than, and her expertise will assist us make AI helpful, dependable, and accessible for companies in all places.”
Dresser has been at Salesforce for 14 years, in accordance with Benioff’s message. Previous to changing into CEO, she held a variety of 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 function at Bumble. (Jones served as Slack’s CEO for a few yr.)
The corporate that ultimately turned Slack was based in 2009. By 2014 it had change into a fast-growing utility for office chat and collaboration instruments. In 2021, the corporate was acquired by Salesforce for almost $28 billion. A lot of the founding employees of Slack, together with cofounders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, left inside just a few years of the acquisition. Over time, a few of Slack’s operations had been absorbed into the bigger construction of Salesforce, and there have been reviews of tradition clashes between the staff of the once-small startup and the enterprise behemoth.
Rob Seaman, Slack’s present chief product officer, will change into interim CEO of Slack, in accordance with two sources with direct information of the manager modifications.
Representatives for Slack hadn’t responded to WIRED’s requests for remark on 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 yr, when Elon Musk took on a distinguished function within the US authorities, Dresser often took to X to indicate assist, saying she agreed that federal workers 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 businesses 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.
