Slack CEO Denise Cloth wardrobe is leaving the corporate and becoming a member of OpenAI as the corporate’s leader income officer, more than one assets inform WIRED. Marc Benioff, the executive govt of Salesforce, which owns Slack, shared information of Cloth wardrobe’s departure in a message to team of workers on Monday night.
At OpenAI, Cloth wardrobe will organize the corporate’s endeavor unit, which has been rising hastily this yr. She is going to report back to leader running officer Brad Lightcap. She begins subsequent week.
“We’re on a trail to position AI equipment into the fingers of thousands and thousands of staff, throughout each trade,” stated OpenAI CEO of Packages Fidji Simo in a commentary to WIRED. “Denise has led that more or less shift sooner than, and her revel in will lend a hand us make AI helpful, dependable, and out there for companies all over the place.”
Cloth wardrobe has been at Salesforce for 14 years, in line with Benioff’s message. Previous to changing into CEO, she held quite a few govt roles in Salesforce’s endeavor gross sales unit. She was once appointed CEO in 2023, after the former CEO, Lidiane Jones, departed for the executive govt function at Bumble. (Jones served as Slack’s CEO for approximately a yr.)
The corporate that finally turned into Slack was once based in 2009. By way of 2014 it had turn out to be a fast-growing software for place of work chat and collaboration equipment. In 2021, the corporate was once got by way of Salesforce for almost $28 billion. A lot of the founding team of workers of Slack, together with cofounders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, left inside a couple of years of the purchase. Through the years, a few of Slack’s operations had been absorbed into the bigger construction of Salesforce, and there have been stories of tradition clashes between the workers of the once-small startup and the endeavor behemoth.
Rob Seaman, Slack’s present leader product officer, will turn out to be period in-between CEO of Slack, in line with two assets with direct wisdom of the manager adjustments.
Representatives for Slack hadn’t answered to WIRED’s requests for remark on the time of newsletter.
In Cloth wardrobe’s tenure as Slack’s CEO, she oversaw the rollout of a number of massive scale AI options, together with AI-generated assembly summaries and an integration with Salesforce’s AI brokers. Previous this yr, when Elon Musk took on a distinguished function in america executive, Cloth wardrobe every now and then took to X to turn reinforce, announcing she agreed that federal staff must be required to ship bullet-pointed emails about what they’ve achieved, and sending a “thumbs up” emoji to a put up about President Donald Trump signing an govt order mandating federal companies to paintings with Musk’s DOGE.
Paresh Dave and Maxwell Zeff contributed to this file.
Replace: 12/9/2025, 2 PM EDT: WIRED has corrected how lengthy Cloth wardrobe was once hired by way of Slack and Salesforce.
