It may be the dog days of summer, but the biggest AI labs are breaking up the monotony with a few executive changes. The latest is OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser. The ChatGPT maker said Thursday she would leave the firm after just eight months on the job. In her place, OpenAI has hired Dali Rajic, formerly president and chief operating officer of Wiz, the Israel-founded cybersecurity company Google bought earlier this year for $32 billion. The hiring underscores just how much cybersecurity has emerged as a key selling point for AI companies.
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It may be the dog days of summer, but the biggest AI labs are breaking up the monotony with a few executive changes. The latest is OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser. The ChatGPT maker said Thursday she would leave the firm after just eight months on the job.
In her place, OpenAI has hired Dali Rajic, formerly president and chief operating officer of Wiz, the Israel-founded cybersecurity company Google bought earlier this year for $32 billion. The hiring underscores just how much cybersecurity has emerged as a key selling point for AI companies.
At Wiz, which sold cloud security software,Rajic is credited with personally closing eight-figure deals with big businesses. He oversaw annualized revenue growth from around $200 million when he joined the company in 2024 to nearly $2 billion today, according to a person with knowledge of the figures. Before joining Wiz, Rajic served as an executive at cybersecurity firm Zscaler and several other software firms, standing out among the startups’ T-shirt–wearing tech staff with his button-down shirts.
“It’s a very interesting move on [OpenAI’s] behalf. It would be an easier decision for them to grab somebody from Oracle or Salesforce or ServiceNow, but taking someone from cybersecurity…that’s a recognition that cybersecurity isn’t a niche, it’s breaking into the mainstream,” said Cyberstarts founder Gili Raanan, who wrote Wiz’s seed check and previously served on its board.
OpenAI is racing with Anthropic to release products that address the threat of havoc AI introduces. Anthropic’s Mythos model dominated the news cycle for several weeks this spring after Anthropic said Mythos was so powerful it could pose a devastating threat to the world’s biggest financial institutions and government agencies.
OpenAI has said its own models could pose similar threats and recently disclosed how several models broke containment during testing and hacked other companies. It recently launched cybersecurity agents that use its AI models to scan companies’ code for vulnerabilities and suggest ways to patch them.
Rajic’s purview will extend well beyond cybersecurity, as did his predecessor’s. As we detailed in this May profile of Dresser, the former Slack and Salesforce executive was hired to make OpenAI a more serious contender for the IT budgets Anthropic had been mopping up. “When I joined OpenAI, it became immediately clear that we needed someone of her caliber to lead our go-to-market efforts,” former OpenAI top executive Fidji Simo,who hired her, told us in May.
Dresser set out to do that via a punishing schedule of client meetings around the world, as well as behind-the-scenes efforts to reorganize OpenAI’s fast-growing salesforce.
OpenAI’s sales team grew threefold under her leadership. She hired at least six senior leaders, including some from Salesforce and Google. Many more from those and other big tech companies joined them.
On Thursday, OpenAI employees who worked with Dresser posted on LinkedIn that they would deeply miss her. One person who had worked with her questioned whether she was given the resources and time to succeed in her position.
OpenAI maintains that the enterprise business is doing swimmingly: It’s on track to hit a target of deriving 50% of its revenue from enterprise customers, up from 40% at the beginning of the year. And its annualized revenue from business customers rose 32% in July from June, though it hasn’t disclosed the level.
Still, it won’t be lost on OpenAI’s customers—̉and its rivals—that the highest-profile people spearheading these efforts have left the company recently. Brad Lightcap, who started the year trying to woo clients with Dresser at the World Economic Forum and more recently had been running an effort to integrate AI with private equity firms’ clients, announced his resignation this week. And last month Simo, who had been on medical leave, stepped down from her position as CEO of AGI deployment to act as a part-time adviser. — Stephanie Palazzolo contributed to this report.
In Other News
• Workday shares rose 18% in Thursday trading after Reuters reported that the HR software company is in talks to be acquired by private equity firm Silver Lake. More here.
• Tarun Chhabra, a former Biden administration official who serves as Anthropic’s head of national security policy, is transitioning out of his role, according to a spokesperson. More here.
• Gemini Space Station, the crypto exchange founded by billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, reported a second-quarter net loss of $108 million, weighed by higher provision for credit card losses due to an identity fraud event.
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