OpenAI has replaced its chief revenue officer just eight months after she started with the company, the latest in a string of executive changes at the high-flying artificial intelligence start-up.
The company said on Thursday that Denise Dresser, who was hired in December to help build OpenAI’s enterprise business, planned to leave the company “for other opportunities.” Ms. Dresser is being replaced by Dali Rajic, the former president and chief operating officer of Wiz, a cybersecurity firm acquired by Google last year.
“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 co-founder and president, said in a statement. “Dali will turn what we’ve learned into repeatable execution as we build out the full system to make A.I. broadly useful for people and businesses.”
Ms. Dresser confirmed that she planned to depart in the coming weeks in an internal note to OpenAI staff on Thursday morning, which she later shared publicly on LinkedIn.
Ms. Dresser’s exit adds to a list of notable departures at the top of OpenAI in recent months, even as the company eyes an initial public offering sometime next year.
Brad Lightcap, one of OpenAI’s early employees and former chief operating officer, left the company this week after eight years. Kate Rouch, the chief marketing officer, departed in April to focus on cancer recovery; Kevin Weil, who oversaw science research, left the same month. And Fidji Simo, a top executive who worked to transform the company’s business, left for health reasons in July.
The changes also come as Mr. Brockman takes tighter control of the business in the wake of Ms. Simo’s departure. Mr. Brockman, who is known for being a hard charger and highly competitive, tapped Mr. Rajic to expand OpenAI’s enterprise business, which the company sees as crucial to catch up with Anthropic, its main competitor.
Anthropic is considering an initial public offering as soon as this year. It has a head start with big business customers. Anthropic’s revenue run-rate — an extrapolation of projected annual revenue, based on a month’s financial performance — was in the single-digit billions at the end of last year. In a matter of months, that number increased into the tens of billions, bolstered by the company’s software coding tool, Claude Code.
While Claude Code’s business dwarfs OpenAI’s offering, called Codex, OpenAI’s run-rate revenue from business customers in July increased 32 percent from the previous month, driven largely by big customers, The New York Times previously reported.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
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