Slack has announced Denise Dresser as its new Chief Executive Officer.
As promised last week following the departure of former CEO Lidiane Jones to the dating platform business Bumble, Salesforce confirmed Dresser’s appointment on Monday. Dresser is a long-term Salesforce employee with extensive executive experience.
Dresser commented on LinkedIn:
I am incredibly humbled to share that I will be joining the team at Slack as CEO. Well before Salesforce acquired Slack, I was a fan. Now that I’ve worked in the platform for three years and seen its transformational power, I’m its biggest advocate. It’s truly made work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. I cannot wait to dive in with the team and help even more companies change the way they work with Slack.”
Dresser has worked at Salesforce for 12 years and is credited with excelling in leadership roles of growing responsibility while enhancing task-driven, high-performance teams. Salesforce says Dresser has a “passion for product-driven customer success, collaborative leadership and mentoring future women leaders and top talent”.
Dresser’s record of success most recently encompasses her previous positions as President of Accelerated Industries and EVP of Enterprise Sales before that. Her work in these key roles saw Salesforce drive some of its most critical customer success stories.
” I couldn’t be more excited to share the news that Denise Dresser is our new CEO of Slack,” Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said on X: “Denise is an incredible business leader who has excelled at every level in her career at Salesforce(…) Denise is a collaborative technology leader who brings teams together and has inspired me and so many of us with her deep commitment to our values, to our customers and to the spirit of innovation.”
Congrats Denise Dresser! @dhdresser our new CEO of @Slack!
Denise is an incredible business leader & champion of Salesforce customer success and innovation who’s deeply committed to our values and our customers.
I couldn’t be more excited to share the news that Denise… pic.twitter.com/ExAwy3cTKi
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) November 13, 2023
As with Jones, the ambition behind Dresser’s appointment likely hinges on successfully bridging Salesforce’s umbrella of businesses and Slack, which the former acquired for $27.7 billion in November 2020 before integrating Slack’s technology into its Customer 360 CRM suite. Dresser’s job description presumably requires maintaining Slack’s autonomous focus on innovative collaboration while seamlessly integrating its products and services across Salesforce’s portfolio.
“One of the keys to Denise’s success is her passion for products, and I know she shares my admiration for our amazing Slack engineering and product teams who have built the world’s most innovative productivity platform,” Benioff added. “With Denise’s leadership, Slack is well positioned to unlock the power of Salesforce with Data+AI+CRM+Trust and make it the place where work happens for more and more of our customers.”
Although Dresser begins her role immediately, Jones will formally finish her tenure at Slack at the end of the year, beginning at Bumble on January 2. Jones has only been in post since January 2023, having succeeded Slack Cofounder Steward Butterfield, who had announced he was leaving the communications and collaboration business less than two years after its acquisition by Salesforce. Jones was previously an executive vice president and general manager at Salesforce, joining the company four years ago.
Dresser will be Slack’s third CEO since the Salesforce acquisition.
Salesforce and Slack’s AI Journey in 2023
Salesforce and Slack have both launched AI products or capability updates this year as the businesses intend to take advantage of AI’s transformational potential.
In May, Salesforce announced Slack GPT, a conversational AI tool to boost business productivity. The technology leveraged CRM and conversational data and added AI features into Slack, generative AI app integrations, and the capability to use customer insights through the Customer 360 and Data Cloud.
The arrival of Slack GPT followed the launch of Salesforce’s Einstein GPT. However, Slack GPT provided more advanced agent-assist innovations via the Service Cloud app than Einstein GPT.
In August, Salesforce launched Slack Sales Elevate, a customised sales home that integrated Slack’s platform with Sales Cloud and involved AI-powered features.
September was a significant month for Slack’s AI product suite, with three new AI-powered productivity tools being revealed, including Slack AI, Slack lists and new automation capabilities.
Slack AI is built natively into the platform to provide tools such as channel recaps and thread summaries. Slack lists enables users to track work tasks, manage requests, and oversee cross-functional projects with a transparent communication flow.
Additionally, the new automation capabilities allow every user, regardless of coding experience, to automate certain tasks. The Taskflow Builder empowers users to connect tools and a hub for streamlined access. Developers can build and deploy custom apps with Slack as the host.
This focus on AI culminated in Jones describing 2023’s AI moment as “amazing” while emphasising that Slack’s access to unstructured data makes its AI capabilities “so powerful”.
