OpenAI Hires Slack CEO as New Chief Revenue Officer

Slack CEO Dennis Multiple sources tell WIRED that Dresser is leaving the company and joining OpenAI as the company’s chief revenue officer. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Slack’s owner Salesforce, shared the news of Dresser’s departure in a message to employees on Monday evening.

At OpenAI, Dresser will manage the company’s enterprise unit, which has been growing rapidly this year. She will report to Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer. She will start next week.

“We’re on our way to putting AI tools into the hands of millions of workers in every industry,” Fidzi Simo, OpenAI CEO of Applications, said in a statement to WIRED. “Dennis has led this kind of change before, and his experience will help us make AI useful, trusted, and accessible to businesses everywhere.”

According to Benioff’s message, Dresser has been at Salesforce for 14 years. Before becoming CEO, he held several executive roles in the enterprise sales unit of Salesforce. He was appointed CEO in 2023, after previous CEO Lydian Jones left for the role of chief executive at Bumble. (Jones served as Slack’s CEO for about a year.)

The company that eventually became Slack was founded in 2009. By 2014 it had become a fast-growing application for workplace chat and collaboration tools. In 2021, the company was acquired by Salesforce for approximately $28 billion. Most of Slack’s founding employees, including co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, left within a few years of the acquisition. Over time, some of Slack’s operations were absorbed into the larger structure of Salesforce, and there were reports of cultural clashes between employees of the once small startup and the enterprise giant.

Rob Seaman, Slack’s current chief product officer, will become Slack’s interim CEO, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the executive changes.

Representatives for Slack did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment at the time of publication.

During Dresser’s tenure as CEO of Slack, he oversaw the rollout of several large-scale AI features, including AI-generated meeting summaries and integration with Salesforce’s AI agents. Earlier this year, when Elon Musk took a prominent role in the U.S. government, Dresser occasionally resorted to the

Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff contributed to this report.

UPDATE: 12/9/2025, 2 PM EDT: Wired has corrected how long Dresser was employed by Slack and Salesforce.