OpenAI hires new CRO as executive shake-up continues

OpenAI has replaced chief revenue officer Denise Dresser after just nine months on the job, naming Wiz president and chief operating officer Dali Rajic to take over the frontier lab’s top sales role. The move is part of a broader shake-up at OpenAI over the past month, which has also seen the departures of chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and the company’s No. 2 executive, CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo.

OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, who has taken on a larger management role since Simo’s departure, announced Rajic’s arrival in a blog post. “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,” Brockman wrote, adding that Rajic “will turn what we’ve learned into repeatable execution as we build out the full system to make AI broadly useful for people and businesses.” Rajic’s previous employer, Wiz, was acquired by Google for $32 billion this year in the tech giant’s largest-ever acquisition.

OpenAI says its products reach more than one billion weekly active users and two million businesses. Despite that growth, executives have suggested both privately and publicly that the company hasn’t hit all of its revenue goals. The company has filed confidentially with the SEC ahead of a potential IPO, though it’s not clear when that might happen. This week, it also purchased $7 billion worth of shares from employees in a tender offer that let them cash in on their equity compensation — a move that may suggest a delay in going public. Bloomberg News’ coverage of the leadership change referenced an OpenAI blog post emphasizing the need for a relentless focus on measurable business impact, language that appears to have been removed from the published version.

This year, CEO Sam Altman has talked about focusing the company on enterprise deployment, cutting back on technology projects and experiments that were seen as distracting from that goal.

Why it matters

The reshuffle underscores a pivot toward disciplined, enterprise-focused revenue growth as OpenAI approaches a possible IPO — and puts a Wiz veteran, whose former company sold to Google for $32 billion, in charge of turning that growth into repeatable sales.