OpenAI drives revenue expansion…hires Slack CEO Dennis Dresser [Stocks+]

Dresser stood out in global sales strategy at Salesforce

Interpreted as a move to retain enterprise customers

OpenAI has hired Slack chief executive officer Dennis Dresser as chief revenue officer (CRO) to accelerate its push into the enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) market. Analysts say this indicates that OpenAI, which has led the generative AI era, has begun a major organizational restructuring to expand its enterprise customer base.

Slack is a representative workplace collaboration platform used by companies worldwide that has transformed the email-centric way of working through real-time messaging and automation features. In 2020, Salesforce acquired it for about 27 trillion won, and it has been regarded as a key asset in the global enterprise software market.

Dresser worked at Salesforce for more than ten years before becoming Slack CEO and stood out in managing large customers and global sales strategy. In particular, he is considered an industry expert in the field of "customer success," which helps enterprise customers achieve tangible results through products. Customer success is a strategic function that goes beyond simple technical support to ensure customers properly use products to achieve business goals.

OpenAI said Dresser will oversee customer success and the enterprise business, as well as its overall global revenue strategy. Dresser said, "I hope to bring the experience of leading the growth of category-defining platforms to OpenAI's enterprise strategy."

OpenAI expects its annual revenue run rate to exceed US$20 billion this year. Run rate is a metric that annualizes expected revenue over one year based on revenue flow in a specific period and is commonly used by fast-growing companies when explaining performance outlooks. OpenAI also announced plans to expand revenue to several hundred billion dollars by 2030.

Currently, more than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week, and enterprise customers also exceed 1 million. However, OpenAI faces many challenges as competitors such as Google and Anthropic rapidly catch up. The company has signed infrastructure investment commitments worth about US$1.4 trillion, prompting some in the market to raise concerns about an "AI bubble."

Fidji Simo, CEO of OpenAI's Applications division, said, "We are at a turning point of providing AI tools to millions of workers across all industries," and "Dennis has the experience to lead such change, and his joining will play an important role in making AI a more trustworthy and accessible technology."

In the industry, Dresser's hiring is seen as a key move in OpenAI's strategy to expand its enterprise customers. As the adoption of generative AI spreads across actual business operations, customer retention management and enterprise sales strategy have become more important than ever. It is also expected that Dresser's experience at Salesforce and Slack will be a direct competitive advantage for OpenAI's next growth phase.

New York=Shin-young Park, correspondent nyusos@hankyung.com