According to Fortune, OpenAI announced Tuesday it has hired Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its first chief of revenue. Dresser, who spent 14 years at Salesforce and was named Slack CEO in 2023, will oversee global revenue strategy. The move comes as OpenAI, valued at $500 billion, does not make a profit despite ChatGPT having over 800 million weekly users. The company has committed more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to cloud and chip partners like Nvidia. CEO Sam Altman recently sent a “code red” internal email to improve ChatGPT and delay other products, while competition from rivals like Google’s Gemini intensifies.
A Desperate Need for Dollars
Look, hiring a chief revenue officer isn’t usually front-page news. But for OpenAI, it’s a massive signal flare. They’re basically admitting, “We’ve built this incredible, world-changing tech, and now we have absolutely no choice but to figure out how to pay for it.” A trillion dollars in obligations? That’s not a business model, that’s a bet-the-company promise to suppliers. And the clock is ticking. Investors in backers like Oracle and Nvidia are getting nervous, with warnings about an AI bubble growing louder. Dresser’s job isn’t to grow revenue; it’s to invent a revenue machine from scratch before the bills come due.
The Slack Playbook: Will It Work?
So why Denise Dresser? Her experience at Salesforce, a SaaS giant, is the obvious answer. OpenAI needs to sell AI to businesses, not just to curious individuals using the free tier of ChatGPT. The plan seems to be: replicate the enterprise software playbook. Integrate, upsell, build ecosystems. But here’s the thing: AI isn’t a productivity app like Slack. It’s a wildly expensive utility. The costs are astronomical and ongoing for every single query. Selling premium subscriptions is one thing, but can they build a B2B pipeline robust enough to offset those trillion-dollar chip and cloud contracts? It’s a monstrous challenge.
Competition and Distraction
And let’s not forget the competitive landscape. While OpenAI was busy with internal drama and now a revenue scramble, Google just unleashed Gemini 3. The competition isn’t sleeping; it’s leveraging existing, profitable empires (like search ads) to fund its AI war. OpenAI’s attempt to build its own web browser, Atlas, feels like a distraction from the core monetization problem. Altman’s “code red” to fix ChatGPT and delay other products suggests they know they’re losing focus. You can’t compete with Google on its home turf *and* build a whole new enterprise sales channel *and* manage a cost structure that would bankrupt a small nation. Something’s gotta give.
The Billion-Dollar Question
Ultimately, this hire is a necessary step, but it’s just a first step. The fundamental question remains: what is OpenAI’s killer, profitable product? Is it the ChatGPT subscription? Enterprise API access? A new ad-supported search engine? They’re trying all of it, which is risky. Dresser has a proven track record in scaling a acquired platform within a larger sales org. But OpenAI isn’t Slack. The stakes are infinitely higher, the costs are unlike anything in software history, and the patience of their financial backers isn’t infinite. This is the year we find out if the AI revolution has a viable business model, or if it was just a fantastically expensive science project.
