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I was looking through our stats on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and I noticed that about 55% of you are not subscribed to the show. That means 45% of you are subscribed and I really do appreciate your support, but the other 55% of you are awesome. But I'm going to ask you for a favor. Could you please hit the subscribe button? It'll take you one second. I'm going to promise you 10 years of this podcast for free.
No paywalls. I'm not going to charge you anything ever, but I'm going to give you 10 years of this show for free. I've already been doing it for five years and I plan on doing it for 10 more. And the only way that we can continue doing this is with your support. So one second of your time to hit the subscribe button right now would help the show tremendously. Thank you so much. Slack CEO Denise Dresser is leaving the company to become
Open AI's chief revenue officer. Now, what does that move tell us about Open AI's push into the enterprise? And how will Slack manage the handoff at the top? After the break, I'll explain what Dresser will run inside Open AI, how our Salesforce and Slack track record lines up with that mandate, and what we know about Slack's interim
leadership. I'll add context on Slack's path from start up to a Salesforce business unit, then outline the likely first steps for Open A is new revenue chief, so you can read the next press release with more of your mind and less signal and less guesswork. Wired reports that Denise Dresser will join Open AI as Chief Revenue Officer after
serving as SLAC's CEOA staff. Memo went out from Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff confirming her departure, and the story says she starts her new rule next week. And with that, we move from boomer to an on the record leadership change in a concrete start date. Now Open AI is placing dresser over its enterprise unit, which
has been growing rapidly. And she'll report to Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. That reporting line clarifies where revenue, operations, enterprise sales meet inside of Open AIACRO, tied directly to the COO, signals a focus on execution customer delivery in the systems that support the sales cycle. Now. The near term read is very simple, though. Open EI wants disciplined enterprise growth and accountability for its leadership.
You know Dresser arrives with long tenure in enterprise sales and go to market roles. According to sources, she spent about 14 years at Salesforce before becoming Slack CEO in 2023. And that's after Lydiane Jones left to run Bumble. Now that sequence that is important because it shows a career built around selling and scaling software to large organizations. Not only running a product team, but running a large team.
Now the background fits Acro role seat that touches field sales, customer success, partner deals and post sale adoption. A Slack will be LED an an interim basis by Rob Seaman, its chief product officer, while the company and Salesforce manage the transition. I think it's Slack, a leader who already owns the road map and feature delivery, which helps steady day-to-day decisions while the board and the parent
company evaluate next steps. And interim arrangement also keeps the door open for internal and external candidates without forcing an immediate, permanent pick. Now, Slack did not comment. We tried to reach them, but they didn't talk to us. So to understand the weight of this hand off, recall the arc of Slack itself. Slack traces its roost back to 2009 to late 2008, 2009, and it took off by 2014 as a workplace chat collaboration tool.
Now, Salesforce acquired the company in 2021 for nearly $28 billion, and over time, more of SLAC's operations integrated into Salesforce. Founders and early leaders, including Stewart Butterfield and Kyle Henderson, departed in the years after the acquisition after they got a huge money bank account addition, which often happens when a startup becomes part of a larger enterprise. Now, Wired also points to reporting about culture friction between Slack, startup DNA and
Salesforce's scale. And that friction gives context to how leadership shifts land inside a combined organization. But a parent company absorbs operations from a smaller company. Product and policy choices can move into different directions, different cadences, and interim leadership can be a practical tool to collaborate those cadences. Usually what happens is the smaller company gets acquired and then either they a get melded into the larger company or they just get shut down.
Luckily if I mean, if you're a Slack user, but it might not be luckily for you and maybe you don't like it and most people don't that I've talked to, they're just like, I don't want to hear another Slack notification ever again in my life if it's possible. Same with Jira, Nobody likes that. But with this new set up, you know a public road map help customers make sense of it. So let's shift over to Open AI again and what ACRO can drive in a year when enterprise demand grows up.
Now Dresser's remit is making AI useful and reliable for businesses across industries. Paraphrasing a statement from Open AI leadership that translates into clear priorities, stable pricing and packaging, predictable support, measurable rollout timelines, any path for large customers to pilot, expand, standardize. SARR ties those motions to revenue targets and retention. So Open AI has to be worried about Google right now. Google owns your enterprise.
They own basically every part of your system. E-mail, chat, they have conferencing, all the Google Doc stuff, It's all there. And you know what? Open AI just wants a small chunk of that. Google is very competitive. They already have all your information. They have all the systems in place to just add AI, just add Gemini to everything, right? And then they have the the backbone to a either wipe out open AI immediately. I don't think they're going to
do that. I think people will continue to subsidize open AI with more money. Over time, Open AI will eventually start making money, more money because the CRO coming in, they're working on the business part of it. Can they do things better than Google? It's tough to tough to feel that out right now. It's still the very early 80s. It's like the beginning of the Internet with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer and also Opera. Do you remember Opera, I think still around.
And what was the one Mosaic? Mosaic was great. I remember those times and even in the terminal, we used to search in the terminal and like type in things. There was servers you can connect to and you could find documents in like just the terminal window. It's crazy. And now of course, you can watch full movies anytime you want to on your phone. So it's like that when Google is the big player now. It used to be IBM back in the day. Microsoft came out of nowhere, took him out.
Open AI could be the next player to take out Google, possibly. And that's why Google's kind of afraid. But they jumped on it with Gemini. Now, Slack isn't really an AI program, you know, It's not an app that's touted as an AI first application. But Dresser's recent work at Slack included rolling out large scale AI features such as AI generated meeting summaries and integrations with Salesforce's AI agents.
That experience lines up with enterprise buyers who now expect concrete productivity gains and not just a chatbot. It also means she has navigated the governance, security, and procurement steps that big customers require. Dresser is all about the money, that's why they got her on and
for a hefty price. So if she can turn this around and if she can make open AIA Enterprise player, even though you know some people already use open AI for enterprise, don't blame them for it. I could see why some companies would jump over to Google because if they already use the Google suite, they may as well use the Gemini suite with the Google Suite and it's just can go hand in hand now.
And I love it. I love the invention of chat bots and I love that things that used to take copy and pasting into ChatGPT to get a summary. So say if somebody emailed me, right? So like right when the ChatGPT came out, somebody would e-mail me, a client would e-mail me and I would send it over to ChatGPT. I would paste it in there and say can you summarize this e-mail for me? OK, super simple. And it would summarize the e-mail and I'm like OK cool. Like give give me like 4 bullet
points and it would do that. And I'm like oh, is this worth it for me to check this out? Sometimes it would be, sometimes it wouldn't be. But I without that step now because Gemini's there, it's all integrated. I don't have to do that anymore. What's the summary of this e-mail? Let me know if the email's, you know, 4 paragraphs long. I don't want to read the whole thing. I need a summary so I can quickly make a decision if I want to read the whole thing.
Now, if I do, that's great. Gemini can tell me is it worth it? Yes. Now Dresser's going to be starting soon. Our start date is compressing the onboarding curve few weeks. She's starting next week and suggests that Open AI plans to plug her right into an existing enterprise machine and have her lead without a long runway. She already knows how to do this. She's going to step in here and she's going to be able to kill it.
Now that puts early emphasis on pipeline health, top accounts and any quarter end commitments already in flight. So anything that's on the table, the dresser's going to step right in, take care of it. And a swift internal tour with product, trust, security and support leaders would come first. Of course, she's probably already meeting those people behind the scenes, followed by meetings with anchor customers and partners. Just to get to know everybody the first first week or two, get
to know everybody. Start doing some business now. Brad Lightcap is worth underlining here. Acro under the CEO aligns revenue with operations and delivery, not only with marketing or finance. Now that set up gives the CROA direct handle on how promises turn into deployments, which is the core friction in enterprise AI. If a customer outcome lags, the escalation path is already inside operation, which shortens
the loop from problem to fix. Now I want to ask you for one second of your time, OK, And I know I already did this at the beginning of the show. Give me one second of your time. I've been doing this show for the last five years, over 1000 episodes, and I promise to give you the next 10 years of my life doing this show every single day, sometimes two times a day, morning and afternoon, so you can get all the information you want about AI and tech and Elon Musk, all that stuff.
So all I need is one second of your time, hit the follow button. That's it. Hit the follow button and I give you the next 10 years of this. No doubt about it. So here's the short wrap of this episode. Slack's EO Denise Dresser will become open AI's chief revenue officer starting next week. She'll run the enterprise unit report to CEO Brad Lightcap, and bring long expertise from Salesforce and Slack, including
recent AI feature rollouts. Slack name's chief product officer Rob Seaman as interim CEO while the company manages this transition support. If you could take a second and hit this subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you
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