OpenAI shake-up continues with second major departure of the week

• Denise Dresser is leaving her role as chief revenue officer at OpenAI after eight months.
• It’s the latest in a batch of executive shake-ups at OpenAI as it positions for an IPO.
• Dali Rajic, the former chief operating officer of Wiz, will replace Dresser.

OpenAI’s executive shake-up continues.

The company announced Thursday that it is replacing its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after only eight months in the role. Dali Rajic, formerly the chief operating officer of Wiz, is taking over the role with the monumental task of preparing OpenAI for its initial public offering, expected next year.

Dresser’s departure joins a wave of change inside OpenAI’s upper ranks. On Tuesday, former chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said he’d be leaving the company — Dresser had been given parts of Lightcap’s former remit as recently as April. In July, OpenAI lost Johannes Heidecke, its head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, its chief futurist. Fidji Simo, its CEO of applications, moved into an advisory role due to health reasons.

The dramatic upheaval comes at a crucial juncture for OpenAI. This year, its rivalry with AI lab Anthropic reached a fever pitch, with the companies battling for market share and talent as they speed toward IPOs. OpenAI is trying to parlay its billion users into a sustainable business, scrambling to build data centers and win customers as its core technology evolves.

Dresser joined OpenAI last December to spearhead its revenue growth, coming from a CEO role at Slack within Salesforce. OpenAI’s Thursday release said she would leave after a transition period.

“Denise has led our revenue organization through a formative period for the business and has worked tirelessly to get the team to where it is today,” Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said in the release.

Dresser thanked the OpenAI staff in a message she posted on LinkedIn on Thursday. She didn’t provide details about her next move, writing that she “made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI in the coming weeks to pursue other opportunities.” Dresser didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

OpenAI told Business Insider that under Dresser, the company now has 2 million business customers, double its count from a year ago. The company aims to generate half of its revenue from enterprises by the end of the year.

Rajic was Wiz’s president and chief operating officer throughout the cloud security firm’s recent purchase by Google. He’d previously held executive roles at Zscaler and AppDynamics.

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