Slack CEO Denise Dresser is leaving the company and joining OpenAI as the company's Chief Revenue Officer, multiple sources told WIRED. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, which owns Slack, shared the news of Dresser's departure in a message to employees on Monday evening.
At OpenAI, Dresser will lead the company's enterprise unit, which has grown rapidly this year. She will report to Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. She starts next week.
“We are on a path to put AI tools in the hands of millions of workers across every industry,” OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo said in a statement to WIRED. “Denise has led such a change before and her experience will help us make AI useful, reliable and accessible to businesses everywhere.”
Dresser has been working at Salesforce for fourteen years, according to Benioff's message. Before becoming CEO, she held a number of leadership roles in Salesforce's enterprise sales division. She was appointed CEO in 2023, after the previous CEO, Lidiane Jones, left for the CEO position at Bumble. (Jones was CEO of Slack 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 almost $28 billion. Many of Slack's founders, including co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, left within a few years of the acquisition. Over time, some of Slack's activities were absorbed into the larger structure of Salesforce, and there were reports of culture clashes between the once small startup's employees and the large enterprise.
Rob Seaman, Slack's current chief product officer, will become Slack's interim CEO, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the management changes.
Representatives for Slack had not responded to WIRED's requests for comment at the time of publication.
During Dresser's tenure as CEO of Slack, she oversaw the rollout of several large-scale AI features, including AI-generated meeting summaries and an integration with Salesforce's AI agents. Earlier this year, as Elon Musk took on a prominent role in the U.S. government, Dresser occasionally turned to
Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff contributed to this report.
Update: 12/9/2025, 2:00 PM EDT: WIRED has corrected how long Dresser was employed by Slack and Salesforce.
