• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

If the ad industry has been hyper-focused on incrementalism in recent years, it should be prepared for a new, far more dynamic noun in its vocabulary, OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser told Lions festival attendees this morning.

"The business executives are in the room, and they're thinking about, not incrementalism, but, like, really exponentialism," Dresser said during a conversation with CNBC's Julia Boorstin.

The use of the two words should be striking for the chief salesperson of what techies would describe as an "exponential media" company, but her statement also sets the stage for a new, far more expansive way for businesses to market to consumers in the AI era.

"I talked about incrementalism or incremental thinking versus exponential," Dresser reiterated later in the conversation, explaining, "What I mean by that is actually thinking with the end in mind of, not just productivity or a process, but actually, what is the reimagine of this business process, and you can actually use AI to help you do that."

Just six months into her OpenAI role, Dresser previously held senior sales and marketing roles at Salesforce and Slack and has been charged with making "enterprise" sales -- including advertising -- 50% of OpenAI's revenue by the end of this year.

That's a big leap for a Big Tech company that has only had a consumer-facing revenue stream for a few years, but is growing, well, exponentially.

But in OpenAI's case, it's not just new advertising inventory that Dresser is pitching, but a new way of engaging with consumers.

She described it as "conversational."

"One of my favorite examples is Maybeline," she said, adding, "We work a lot with L'Oreal and they're doing [a campaign] where you can actually try on the product and actually see what the mascara looks like. It's on their website and it's going to move into ChatGPT.

"Think about that in the moment you can actually have that virtual AI-powered experience. That's an entirely new experience. And it's because in ChatGPT the users are not just going to search for a keyword, they're actually going to do something. And 20% of the users that go there are actually going there for some commercial intent already.