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 government of Salesforce, which owns Slack, shared information of Dresser’s departure in a message to workers on Monday night.
At OpenAI, Dresser will handle the corporate’s enterprise unit, which has been rising quickly this 12 months. She’s 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 palms of hundreds of thousands of staff, throughout each trade,” mentioned OpenAI CEO of Functions Fidji Simo in an announcement 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 all over the place.”
Dresser has been at Salesforce for 14 years, based on Benioff’s message. Previous to changing into CEO, she held various government roles in Salesforce’s enterprise gross sales unit. She was appointed CEO in 2023, after the earlier CEO, Lidiane Jones, departed for the chief government position at Bumble. (Jones served as Slack’s CEO for a couple of 12 months.)
The corporate that ultimately grew to become Slack was based in 2009. By 2014 it had develop 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 workers 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 have been absorbed into the bigger construction of Salesforce, and there have been experiences of tradition 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, based on two sources with direct information of the chief 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 12 months, when Elon Musk took on a outstanding position within the US authorities, Dresser sometimes took to X to point out assist, saying she agreed that federal staff must be required to ship bullet-pointed emails about what they’ve completed, and sending a “thumbs up” emoji to a put up about President Donald Trump signing an government 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.
