Stewart Butterfield speaks on November 08, 2019 in San Francisco, California.
Phillip Faraone | Getty Images
Salesforce said on Monday that Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield is leaving the company. He’ll be replaced by Lidiane Jones, an executive vice president at Salesforce who joined in 2019.
Butterfield’s announced departure comes days after Salesforce said co-CEO Bret Taylor was stepping down just a year after being promoted to the share the top job with Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s co-founder.
Benioff informed employees on a call on Monday that Butterfield was leaving, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on the record. Salesforce acquired Slack for about $27 billion last year, its largest purchase ever. The deal was announced in late 2020.
“Stewart is an incredible leader who created an amazing, beloved company in Slack,” a company spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce and today Slack is woven into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Stewart also was instrumental in choosing Lidiane Jones as the next Slack CEO to lead it into its next chapter. Lidiane has a strong background in customer and enterprise tech and has been among Salesforce’s leadership for over three years. We’re grateful for Stewart and excited for Lidiane as she takes over the reins of Slack.”
Tamar Yehoshua, Slack’s product chief, will also depart, along with Jonathan Prince, senior vice president in charge of marketing, brand and communications, the people familiar said.
Jones spent over 12 years at Microsoft, before leaving to join Sonos in 2015. She’s been at Salesforce since 2019 and is currently executive vice president and general manager of digital experience clouds.
Butterfield originally worked with the other co-founder of Slack, Cal Henderson, at photo-sharing website Flickr, which Yahoo acquired in 2005. In 2009 the two men founded Tiny Speck as they sought to build an online video game named Glitch. The game failed to become a world-beating hit and Tiny Speck shut it down. Tiny Speck had developed software employees had used to build Glitch, and the startup made the software available to the public as Slack in 2014.
It grew quickly, mobilizing Microsoft. When Microsoft launched Teams in 2016, Slack took out an ad in the New York Times to welcome Microsoft to the market.
“I’m not going to do anything entrepreneurial,” Butterfield told Salesforce employees in a Slack message. “As I said in my announcement to Slack team, these days my fantasies are about gardening. As hackneyed as it might sound, I really am going to spend more time with my family (as well as work on some personal projects, focus on health and generally put time into those things which [are] harder to do when one is leading a large organization).”
Butterfield met with Taylor in March 2020 and said Slack wanted to acquire Quip, the productivity app Taylor sold to Salesforce in 2016, from Salesforce. Months later, Taylor told Butterfield that while Salesforce wasn’t interested in selling Quip to Slack, Salesforce was interested in buying Slack.
Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach, right, walks to the morning session during the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 11, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Workday shares slid more than 5% in extended trading Tuesday after the finance and human resources software maker issued quarterly margin guidance that came in below Wall Street projections.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $2.32 adjusted vs. $2.18 expected
Revenue: $2.43 billion vs. $2.42 billion expected
The company forecast a fourth-quarter adjusted operating margin of at least 28.5% and $2.355 billion in subscription revenue, according to a statement. The StreetAccount consensus was a 28.7% margin and $2.35 billion in subscription revenue.
Workday’s revenue grew about 13% year over year in the quarter, which ended on Oct. 31. Net income of $252 million, or 94 cents per share, was up from $193 million, or 72 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.
Subscription revenue in the third quarter totaled $2.24 billion, with an adjusted operating margin of 28.5%. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had anticipated $2.24 billion in subscription revenue and a 28.1% margin.
During the fiscal third quarter, Workday announced artificial intelligence agents for analyzing employee performance testing financial health, and the company revealed plans to buy AI and learning software startup Sana for $1.1 billion. Also, activist investor Elliott Management said it had built a Workday stake worth over $2 billion.
Workday has seen its stock decline this year as pundits discuss the risk of generative AI tools threatening the growth prospects for cloud software incumbents. Company shares have fallen 9% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq Composite index has gained 19%.
Mary Barra, Chair and CEO of General Motors (right to left), Mark Reuss, President, Sterling Anderson, Chief Product Officer, and Dave Richardson, Senior Vice President Software and Services Engineering at “GM Forward” on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 in New York.
GM
DETROIT – A third high-profile technology executive is leaving General Motors amid a restructuring of the automaker’s software and product businesses, CNBC has learned.
Baris Cetinok, GM senior vice president of software and services product management, will depart the company effective Dec. 12, the automaker confirmed Tuesday after an internal announcement to employees.
Cetinok is the third tech-turned-auto executive to leave GM in roughly a month as the company combines its vehicle software engineering and global product units under one organization, led by new Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson.
“Baris has built a strong software product management team at GM. We’re grateful for his contributions and wish him continued success. With hardware and software engineering unified under Global Product, we’re integrating product management with engineering to accelerate the delivery of exceptional in-vehicle experiences,” GM said in an emailed statement to CNBC.
Cetinok, who joined GM in September 2023 after stints with companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, could not immediately be reached for comment. The announcement of his departure comes a month after he described his position as “a product person’s dream” in an interview with CNBC.
GM’s senior vice president of software and services engineering, Dave Richardson, and its head of GM artificial intelligence, Barak Turovsky, have also left the company since October. Richardson was with GM for more than two years, while Turovsky was hired in March.
GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson during the automaker’s “GM Forward” event on Oct. 22, 2025 in New York City.
Michael Wayland / CNBC
Anderson left the self-driving company he cofounded, Aurora Innovation, to join GM. He told CNBC last month that in order for the automaker to succeed, software and product must be thought of as one and the same.
“That’s the point of the role, I think, is it brings together all of these pieces into a unified approach to how we do product going forward,” Anderson said during an Oct. 22 interview at a GM technology event in New York.
Anderson, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who later led Tesla’s AutoPilot program, said his goal is to accelerate the pace of GM’s innovations.
When Anderson’s appointment with GM was announced in May, Cetinok said in a LinkedIn post he was “delighted to welcome” the executive to the company. GM CEO Mary Barra and GM President Mark Reuss also hailed Anderson as being equipped to “evolve” and “reinvent” the automaker’s operations.
The global automotive industry has battled for years to better integrate technology into vehicles – from their production to consumer-facing software and remote, or “over-the-air,” updates like Tesla pioneered.
GM has taken an aggressive approach to combat such challenges by hiring leaders from Tesla and technology companies such as Apple and Google. However, many times, such executives have had short tenures with the company.
Enrique Lores, President and Chief Executive Officer of HP Inc. speaks at COMPUTEX forum in Taipei, Taiwan June 3, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
PC and printer maker HP Inc. said Tuesday it’ll lower its headcount by 4,000 to 6,000 people, representing a cut of up to 10%. HP also issued a lower-than-expected earnings projection for the new fiscal year.
Shares of the company fell 6% in extended trading.
Here’s how HP did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
EPS: 93 cents adjusted vs. 92 cents expected
Revenue: $14.64 billion vs. $14.48 billion expected
HP’s revenue increased 4% year over year in the quarter, which ended on Oct. 31, according to a statement. Net income of $795 million, or 84 cents per share, was up from $763 million, or 80 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.
For the first quarter of HP’s fiscal 2026, the company called for 73 cents to 81 cents in adjusted net earnings per share, while the LSEG consensus was 79 cents. For all of fiscal 2026, HP sees $2.90 to $3.20 in adjusted per share, below the LSEG consensus of $3.33.
“HP’s outlook reflects the added cost driven by the current U.S. trade-related regulations in place, and associated mitigations,” the company said in the statement.
The company’s personal systems unit that includes desktop and laptop computers contributed $10.35 billion in revenue, up 8% and above StreetAccount’s $10.15 billion consensus.
HP said it expects to complete the headcount reduction by the end of fiscal 2028. The company said the restructuring will result in savings of at least $1 billion in annualized gross run rate by the end of fiscal 2028. HP said it expects to incur about $650 million in charges, of which $250 million will happen in fiscal 2026.
“As we look ahead, we see a significant opportunity to embed AI into HP to accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction and boost productivity,” HP CEO Enrique Lores said on a conference call with analysts.
Corporate executives across industries are hoping to draw on generative artificial intelligence products to speed up software developers and automate customer service. Cloud providers are buying large supplies of memory to meet computing demand from companies that build AI models, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, leading to a rise in the cost per gigabyte of RAM this year.
HP, whose headcount stood at 58,000 as of December, announced a similarly sized round of layoffs in 2022. Several other technology companies have announced layoffs in recent months as U.S. consumers face higher prices and interest rates.
“Memory costs are currently 15 to 18% of the cost of a typical PC, and while an increase was expected, its rate has accelerated in the last few weeks,” Lores said.
The company does expect to benefit after Microsoft stopped supporting its Windows 10 operating system in October, which will lead people to buy new machines, Lores said. Around 60% of HP’s installed base has moved to Windows 11, he said.
HP’s printing business did $4.3 billion in revenue, down 4%. The pricing environment is competitive, and customers are putting off purchases of new models, said Karen Parkhill, the company’s finance chief.
As of Tuesday’s close, HP shares were down 25% for the year, while the S&P 500 index has gained 15% in the same period.