Slack’s new CEO, Denise Dresser, has taken the helm of the communications platform after a turbulent period filled with leadership changes. This is not something you often see at an established company, but circumstances beyond their control have led to three chief executives in less than a year. Dresser, who was introduced as the latest CEO in November, recognizes the challenges of stepping into the role under these circumstances, but is determined to bring stability to the company.
“You know, like anything, it’s always hard to step into any new company and do it in a way that’s graceful, but I think the team gave me plenty of coaching, and we really saw the vision together,” Dresser told TechCrunch.
Dresser grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston and studied accounting at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She brings more than a dozen years of executive experience at Salesforce, and her skills will be put to the test as she takes over from her predecessor, Lidiane Jones, who was only in the role for 10 months before leaving to lead Bumble. Jones had taken the reins from Slack’s co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, who announced his departure at the end of 2022.
Acquisition changes often lead to executive turnover, but Arjun Bhatia, a William Blair analyst, doesn’t see it as a concerning trend.
“You want a stable leadership team, of course, and you want someone who’s focusing on it, but the CEO turnover we’ve seen is not concerning at this point,” Bhatia told TechCrunch. “If that becomes more recurring, certainly that view might change, but I think it’s a natural course after an acquisition like this for a company like Slack to find its place inside the Salesforce ecosystem.”
Dresser believes that she is building on the foundation laid by her predecessors while bringing her own strengths and personality to the job.
“I ask a lot of questions, and I definitely am an accountant at heart,” she said. “So I like to be organized and I’ll continue that on, but it’s not like it’s a big pull. I think the foundation is already there, and it’s an incredibly well-run organization.”
Slack’s Challenges at Salesforce
The acquisition of Slack by Salesforce for $28 billion raised some eyebrows, even taking into account the inflated stock prices of 2020. The hope was that Slack would become the communication layer on top of Salesforce’s business software offerings. While this is still the goal, Slack’s revenue growth has slowed significantly since the acquisition. Exact numbers are not available since Salesforce stopped reporting them in 2020, but growth has decreased from 46% year-over-year in Q3 of 2023 to just 16% in Q4 of 2024.
According to Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials, Dresser faces the challenge of finding the right balance between maintaining Slack as a stand-alone brand to attract non-Salesforce customers, while also allowing Salesforce customers to utilize Slack within the platform for collaboration.
“She’s got to be able to figure out what the right balance is between Slack as a standalone brand that continues to attract non-Salesforce customers, while enabling Salesforce customers to use Slack everywhere within the platform they need to collaborate,” Leary said.
Dresser believes that AI, specifically generative AI, has a significant role to play in Slack’s future. She sees AI as a natural fit for a communication platform with a wealth of unstructured data.
“When you think about it from a higher-level perspective, Slack has so much of the world’s conversations happening in unstructured data,” she explained. “And then you think about Salesforce having this incredible set of customer data, some of the world’s most valued data. The opportunity to bring structured and unstructured data into Slack and integrate those really creates this powerful platform for the future.”
However, Dresser acknowledges that executing on AI is crucial, and one way it has already helped her in her new role is by providing summaries of long product threads. This was fitting for her as an accountant, as summarization is a key feature of generative AI. But the quality of these summaries is crucial to the success of AI in Slack.
“I don’t know if I think it’s that tough. I think it was the original vision when the two companies came together,” she said. “I think there’s a real recognition that there’s something very special here that we want to nurture and continue. And I think that’s been a pretty consistent theme from the very beginning.”
Competing with Microsoft as a Standalone Brand
One of Slack’s biggest challenges as a standalone brand is competing with Microsoft’s Teams, which is combined with Office 365, Dynamics 365, and AI through Microsoft Copilot. J.P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research, believes that Slack must be careful not to alienate existing customers, who are deeply loyal to the platform, while also trying to expand its user base by integrating more closely with Salesforce.
“It’s logical for Slack to try to expand its user base by integrating Salesforce more closely, but it must be careful not to alienate existing customers, who are tremendously loyal to what’s offered today. In the meantime, Microsoft Teams is a behemoth that has a chance to grab even more minutes via Copilot,” Gownder told TechCrunch.
Bhatia points out that while Microsoft does have a distribution advantage, Slack’s interoperability and ease of use are significant strengths in the market.
“Microsoft doesn’t have that interoperability play as much. Their advantage by far is distribution. And two big advantages that Slack has in their market are interoperability and ease of use,” Bhatia said.
One additional challenge Dresser faces is the recent departure of Slack’s co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson, who was replaced by Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris. Dresser understands the significance of this change, as Harris brings a wealth of experience building Salesforce, while also losing a leader with a deep understanding of Slack’s technical foundation.
“I try to just help people understand that I’m here because I am deeply, deeply passionate about what we can do for the world, for our users, and our employees as well at Slack and the broader Salesforce — and I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
