OpenAI has appointed outgoing Slack CEO Denise Dresser as Chief Revenue Officer. With her, the company is bringing in an executive who will play a key role in the next phase of the company, in which growth alone is no longer enough and financial sustainability is becoming increasingly important.
According to an analysis by Engadget, the appointment is directly related to the increasing pressure to move OpenAI toward profitability, especially now that the company has been reorganized as a public benefit corporation.
Engadget points out that OpenAI is struggling with an exceptionally high cost base. The company invests heavily in data center capacity, relies on infrastructure partners, and has long-term commitments for the procurement and construction of server components.
On top of that, there are the operational costs per AI interaction, including every ChatGPT query. In that light, the role of Chief Revenue Officer takes on strategic significance: not only to grow revenue, but to build a revenue model that can support OpenAI’s scale.
Dresser comes from Slack, where she was CEO until this week. In that role, she oversaw the integration of Slack into Salesforce and worked on further positioning the platform as a central digital work environment, in which AI played an increasingly important role. Previously, she spent more than ten years at Salesforce, where she built international sales organizations and led commercial teams serving large and complex enterprises.
OpenAI focuses on revenue
According to Engadget, her profile fits into a broader trend within OpenAI. The recent appointments of Dresser and Fidji Simo, who took over as CEO of the applications division earlier this year, point to a distinct Silicon Valley approach, according to the media outlet. Both executives have experience in scaling and commercializing platforms on a global scale. With this, OpenAI seems to be choosing to focus more emphatically on scale, revenue, and maximizing value per user interaction. In that context, there is even talk of possible advertising models within AI applications, in line with Simo’s background at Meta.
OpenAI itself emphasizes that Dresser’s experience aligns with its ambition to make AI widely available for everyday use by millions of employees in a variety of sectors. The company sees AI shifting from isolated pilots to technology that is deployed organization-wide for core processes and business-critical applications. AI solutions must not only be powerful and user-friendly, but also reliable, scalable, and commercially viable.
Figures shared by OpenAI show that a large majority of employees indicate that AI makes their work faster or better, and that new forms of work are emerging in which tasks that were previously out of reach are now possible.
At the same time, Engadget’s analysis puts these positive adoption figures into perspective. Without a solid and sustainable revenue model, the large-scale deployment of AI will continue to be associated with high costs. The appointment of Denise Dresser therefore marks not only an organizational expansion, but also a clear shift towards financial discipline and commercial acumen within OpenAI.