According to engadget, OpenAI has announced that Denise Dresser, the current CEO of Slack, will be the company’s new Chief Revenue Officer. She will oversee revenue strategy across enterprise and customer success. This follows the hiring of Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart and head of Facebook at Meta, as OpenAI’s CEO of Products back in May. The announcement positions Dresser as key to leading the company toward profitability after its reorganization as a public benefit corporation. OpenAI’s leadership stated they are on a path to put AI tools into the hands of millions of workers, leveraging Dresser’s experience.
The Silicon Valley Playbook
So here’s the thing. When you look at these two hires—Fidji Simo and now Denise Dresser—a very clear pattern emerges. OpenAI isn’t just hiring brilliant AI researchers anymore. They’re hiring seasoned Silicon Valley operators whose entire careers have been about scaling user bases and, more importantly, monetizing attention. Simo helped build Meta’s colossal ads business. Dresser just led Slack, a platform built on converting user engagement into enterprise subscription revenue. This isn’t subtle. OpenAI is gearing up for a massive, traditional tech industry push: grow at all costs, then monetize relentlessly. The earlier leadership expansion with Simo set the stage, and Dresser’s hire is the next logical act.
The Revenue Problem
But Denise Dresser has one heck of a job ahead of her. Why? Because OpenAI’s costs are astronomical and fundamentally different from running a chat app or a social network. We’re talking about billions spent on data center partnerships, commitments to buy and build server components, and the raw compute cost of every single ChatGPT query. It’s a money furnace. Even if they roll out ads in chats—which seems almost inevitable given Simo’s background—will that be enough? Probably not on its own. She’ll need to supercharge enterprise deals, find new subscription tiers, and maybe even get creative with how AI interactions are bundled and sold. The path to profitability for an AI company this ambitious is uncharted and brutally expensive.
What This Means For AI
This executive shift tells us where OpenAI’s priorities lie for the next few years. The pure research phase is giving way to the commercialization phase. The goal is no longer just to build the most capable AI; it’s to build the most *used* and most *profitable* AI. That means the product experience for businesses and consumers will be shaped by revenue goals. Will it lead to more useful and integrated tools for workers, as they hope? Possibly. But it also raises questions about how aggressive the monetization will feel. Will free tiers get squeezed? How intrusive will ads be in a creative or analytical conversation with an AI? Dresser’s success will be measured by her ability to balance those scales without driving users away. It’s the ultimate Silicon Valley tightrope walk, but now with the world’s most expensive technology as the main act.
