OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap calls the AI giant the 'world's most active Slack user'

"OpenAI employees are Slacking up a storm. While AI companies say they're radically changing how we work, from work to messaging to cutting head count entirely, OpenAI is sticking with one classic workplace tool - and they use it a lot. OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said his company had high-frequency Slackers on Fortune's "Term Sheet" podcast. "We are probably the world's most active users of Slack internally at OpenAI," Lightcap said."

"OpenAI's sales team also "runs on" Salesforce, Lightcap said. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020 for $27.7 billion. Both Salesforce and Slack are SaaS platforms - as in, software-as-a-service. This is an area that many new AI companies are jumping into, including OpenAI itself. The company released a new suite of workplace tools in October, including an inbound sales assistant and a contract searcher."

""We use kind of all the canonical SaaS systems you can think of," Lightcap said. "These are really, really important systems for OpenAI, and I think they're going to be really, really enduring and important systems for a while." In a July blog post, former OpenAI engineer Calvin French-Owen described the company's operations, including its reliance on Slack over email. "An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack," Calvin French-Owen wrote. "There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there," he continued."

OpenAI relies heavily on Slack for internal communication, using it as the primary messaging platform across teams. Sales operations run primarily on Salesforce, reflecting widespread use of canonical SaaS systems. The company released a workplace tools suite in October that includes an inbound sales assistant and a contract searcher while continuing to integrate established SaaS platforms. Internal collaboration emphasizes real-time messaging over email, with minimal email traffic reported and many workflows centralized in Slack. Core SaaS systems are treated as enduring infrastructure even as AI-driven workplace features are developed and adopted.

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