SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI said Tuesday it has tapped Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its first chief revenue officer, a message to cautious investors that the ChatGPT maker is serious about turning a profit on its artificial intelligence technology.
OpenAI said Dresser will oversee global revenue strategy and “help more companies use AI in their daily operations.”
Dresser had already spent more than a decade at Salesforce when the software pioneer announced in 2020 that it would buy work chat service Slack for $27.7 billion. She helped integrate Slack into the software company before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tapped her as CEO in 2023.
Salesforce said in a statement that it was “grateful for Denise’s leadership during her 14 years at Salesforce.” Rob Seaman, Slack’s chief product officer, will assume his responsibilities on an interim basis.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this month triggered a “code red” alert in an internal email to employees to improve its flagship product, ChatGPT, and delay development of other products.
OpenAI first launched ChatGPT just over three years ago, sparking global fascination and a commercial boom in generative AI technology and giving the San Francisco-based startup an early lead. But the company faces increasing competition from rivals, including Google, which last month launched Gemini 3, the latest version of its own artificial intelligence assistant.
Altman has said that ChatGPT now has more than 800 million weekly users. But the $500 billion company is not making a profit and has committed more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to the cloud computing providers and chipmakers it depends on to power its artificial intelligence systems.
The risk that OpenAI will not make enough money to meet the expectations of backers like Oracle and Nvidia has amplified investor concerns about an AI bubble.
OpenAI makes money from premium subscriptions to ChatGPT, but most users get the free version. OpenAI introduced its own web browser, Atlas, in October, in a bid to compete with Google’s Chrome as more internet users rely on AI to answer their questions. But OpenAI has not yet tried to sell ads on ChatGPT, which is how Google makes money from its dominant search business.