OpenAI appoints Wiz's Dali Rajic as chief revenue officer
OpenAI's C-suite is reshuffling again, this time at the top of the revenue machine — and it's happening in the shadow of an expected IPO. Meanwhile, WhatsApp is putting scam detection on your phone instead of its servers.
OpenAI has hired Dali Rajic — most recently president and COO of Wiz, the cybersecurity firm acquired by Google — as chief revenue officer, replacing Denise Dresser, who is leaving after just eight months at the company. Dresser, the former Slack CEO who joined in December 2025 after more than a decade at Salesforce, will stay through a transition period "to pursue other opportunities," per OpenAI, which credits her with building the team and "the commercial foundation" behind a business now serving more than one billion weekly users and over two million businesses. Rajic's mandate, in Greg Brockman's words, is to turn what OpenAI has learned into "repeatable execution": the announcement says he will "build the revenue operating system" for the next phase, and OpenAI has also struck a go-to-market partnership with Chad Peets and RPT Partners.
The timing is the story. Dresser's exit lands days after longtime president Brad Lightcap announced he's leaving — a senior churn we flagged as it happened — OpenAI's Brad Lightcap exits after eight years to start something new — and CNBC notes both departures come as OpenAI gears up for what's expected to be a blockbuster IPO. Rajic is a known quantity in scaling enterprise revenue: before Wiz he was president and COO of Zscaler and chief customer and revenue officer at AppDynamics, all companies that grew into major public-market names under his watch. For a company whose valuation story now hinges on converting two million business customers into durable enterprise spend, that's precisely the profile the board would want in the seat — and precisely why Dresser's abrupt exit, barely a year in, reads less like a reset and more like a signal that the revenue team was being rebuilt ahead of the roadshow.
WhatsApp is rolling out an optional Scam Alert feature that uses on-device machine learning to flag suspicious messages, with the warning visible only to the recipient. In the limited beta, when the model judges a message likely to be a scam, users see an in-chat alert and can block, report, or continue the conversation; mark a chat as trusted and the warning disappears for good, with an opt-in to share the last five received messages to improve accuracy. Meta says no message content leaves the device for classification and nothing is auto-reported — a deliberate privacy stance after the FTC logged victims losing $425 million to WhatsApp-based scams out of more than $2.1 billion lost to social media scams in 2025.
The on-device design matters as much as the feature itself: with end-to-end encryption as WhatsApp's core promise and regulators circling, Meta is showing that scam screening doesn't require a server-side backdoor. The bet is that a phone-sized model can catch the patterns — urgent wire requests, pig-butchering scripts — that already slipped past Meta's earlier device-linking scam detection this year. It's a modest beta today, but the trust calculus it tests — safety without surveillance — is the template every encrypted messenger will be watching.
Would you trust an on-device AI to judge which of your messages look like scams — or is any automated flagging too much? Tell us in the comments.
