• Denise Dresser is leaving her role as chief revenue officer at OpenAI after eight months.
• It's the latest in a batch of executive shake-ups at OpenAI as it positions for an IPO.
• Dali Rajic, the former chief operating officer of Wiz, will replace Dresser.

OpenAI's executive shake-up continues.

The company announced Thursday that it is replacing its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, after only eight months in the role. Dali Rajic, formerly the chief operating officer of Wiz, is taking over the role with the monumental task of preparing OpenAI for its initial public offering, expected next year.

Dresser's departure joins a wave of change inside OpenAI's upper ranks. On Tuesday, former chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said he'd be leaving the company — Dresser had been given parts of Lightcap's former remit as recently as April. In July, OpenAI lost Johannes Heidecke, its head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, its chief futurist. Fidji Simo, its CEO of applications, moved into an advisory role due to health reasons.

The dramatic upheaval comes at a crucial juncture for OpenAI. This year, its rivalry with AI lab Anthropic reached a fever pitch, with the companies battling for market share and talent as they speed toward IPOs. OpenAI is trying to parlay its billion users into a sustainable business, scrambling to build data centers and win customers as its core technology evolves.

Dresser joined OpenAI last December to spearhead its revenue growth, coming from a CEO role at Slack within Salesforce. OpenAI's Thursday release said she would leave after a transition period.

"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 president, said in the release.

Dresser thanked the OpenAI staff in a message she posted on LinkedIn on Thursday. She didn't provide details about her next move, writing that she "made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI in the coming weeks to pursue other opportunities." Dresser didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

OpenAI told Business Insider that under Dresser, the company now has 2 million business customers, double its count from a year ago. The company aims to generate half of its revenue from enterprises by the end of the year.

Rajic was Wiz's president and chief operating officer throughout the cloud security firm's recent purchase by Google. He'd previously held executive roles at Zscaler and AppDynamics.

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• OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT ads to Brazil and Mexico as part of its latest push to grow the product.
• OpenAI has been enhancing its ChatGPT ad tools, testing new ad styles and integrations.
• ChatGPT recently reached the milestone of 1 billion active users.

OpenAI is sprinting ahead with upgrades for ChatGPT ads.

The AI lab revealed a new raft of releases to advertisers in a Wednesday email reviewed by Business Insider, part of its rapid push to build up a cash-printing ads business from scratch as it explores routes to make more money. ChatGPT users are now guinea pigs for the quickly evolving tool, with new countries coming online and new ad styles in early testing.

The new releases arrive shortly after OpenAI announced in late July that ChatGPT had hit the milestone of 1 billion active users. A company spokesperson confirmed the email's contents to Business Insider.

OpenAI is launching advertising on ChatGPT in Brazil and Mexico in the coming week, the email said, adding to several other active markets: the US, Canada, the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. In July, the company launched the ability for advertisers to target users within geographic areas of a country.

ChatGPT users on Free or Go plans are the only ones who are served ads. They're now beginning to see a new ad style, with multiple products in a carousel. For now, these carousels are confined to a single advertiser's products, unlike the Google carousel, which often tops that site's search results.

OpenAI's email also announced improvements to the product's tools for tracking and measuring campaigns, which competitors Google and Meta have been developing for years. Advertisers on ChatGPT can now test ad campaigns that optimize for specific conversions, such as sales or sign-ups. The email also listed new partnerships with the adtech companies Hightouch and Triple Whale, adding more ways to measure an ad campaign's success.

OpenAI is also signaling that it could roll out "sponsored agents." While it wasn't included in the Wednesday email, OpenAI's latest advertising policies document, updated on July 31, defined "sponsored agents" as "conversational experiences that allow users to interact with an AI-generated representative for an Advertiser's business, products, or services." It indicates that the company is testing new ad styles built on generative AI. The OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment on this.

Advertisers see incremental changes to ChatGPT's ads tool practically every day, Juozas Kaziukėnas, who sold his market intelligence firm about two years ago and closely watches the e-commerce market, told Business Insider.

"The ad product is quite clearly one of the highest priorities for OpenAI, just from the rate and pace of change that is happening," he said.

Kaziukėnas views the possible foray into an "AI native" ad format as promising for marketers.

"We'll see if brands actually want that because we often find that despite many experiments from the companies, often advertisers just want traffic back to their sites," he said.

As popular as ChatGPT has become, OpenAI has a major feat of catch-up ahead. When the company last revealed its annual recurring ads revenue in May, it tallied $100 million. Google and Meta respectively raked in over $294 billion and $196 billion in ads revenue last year.

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• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
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Every week in the AI Playground section of our Tech Memo newsletter, we feature folks trying an AI tool, or sometimes I test stuff out myself.

This week, we hear from Business Insider's star AI reporter Stephen Council. He's been using OpenAI's Codex tool to build software stuff without using code. OpenAI merged Codex with ChatGPT this week, so this is good timing.

I adore the copy-paste tool. Every day, it saves me from misspelling names, misquoting sources, wasting time on rewriting… I could go on and on. It's quick and easy and basically perfect.

This week, Codex made it better. I've long wanted a version of copy-paste that lets me store multiple strings of text at once, so I can copy something new without losing what I'd copied before. There are clipboard managers for this online, but they often cost money, or add a pop-up and additional clicks — exactly the slowdowns I don't want.

I gave OpenAI's tool a 190-word prompt, and voila! Five minutes and 26 seconds later, Codex handed me my app.

Now, I have 9 different copy-paste slots on my work MacBook. Command-c and command-v work as normal, that's slot one. But now I can keep additional names, quotes, and links at the tip of my tongue: cmd-c-2 copies text for cmd-v-2, cmd-c-3 ties to cmd-v-3, and on and on. The app hangs out on my menu bar, so if I want to see what each slot is storing, it's all a click away.

Very satisfying. It's exactly the niche and nerdy case that vibe coding is good for.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.