For two years, the AI talent war was about researchers, with multimillion-dollar pay packages and signing bonuses in the tens of millions.
That war is still going, but OpenAI and Anthropic just opened a second front aimed straight at the enterprise software giants whose stocks are already getting hit.
Denise Dresser, formerly the CEO of Slack inside Salesforce, is now Chief Revenue Officer at OpenAI, while Jennifer Majlessi joined OpenAI as head of go-to-market after a stint at Salesforce.
Anthropic has also hired from Salesforce, per a source familiar with the moves.
OpenAI has also poached "forward-deployed engineers" from Palantir over the last few months, the people who go on-site and help big enterprise clients implement the software. Salesforce, OpenAI, Snowflake, Datadog and Palantir all declined or did not immediately comment.
Enterprise customers are the most profitable, "stickiest" part of OpenAI's business, making up about 40% of revenue as of January.
CFO Sarah Friar said the company is on track to push that to 50% by year-end, and OpenAI also said in November that more than a million businesses worldwide are using its tools.
Selling to a million businesses requires people who already know how, and researchers do not sell deals to Fortune 500 IT departments. Salesforce, Snowflake, Datadog and Palantir veterans do, which is where the checks are going.
Software stocks have been getting hit on fears that ChatGPT, Claude and the rest will eat into the cloud subscription model, with the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV) down about 20% this year.
Now AI companies are also pulling out the people who actually generate revenue at those firms. Oracle laid off thousands earlier this month while doubling down on AI cloud, and Meta and Microsoft have announced workforce cuts of their own.
Not every executive is a fit, with one source at an AI company saying some traditional tech leaders do not want to work the hours these companies expect.
The talent war is real. The cultural mismatch is too.
