Fidji Simo joins OpenAI as CEO of Applications
OpenAI's chief operating, financial and product officers were realigned to report to Simo rather than Altman, who said the change freed him to focus on research, compute and safety.
- Labs & people
- Minor
OpenAI announced that Fidji Simo, chief executive of Instacart and a decade-long Facebook executive before that, would join the company in a newly created role, CEO of Applications, reporting directly to Sam Altman. Chief operating officer Brad Lightcap, chief financial officer Sarah Friar and chief product officer Kevin Weil were all realigned to report to Simo rather than to Altman.
Altman said the restructuring would let him spend more time on research, compute and safety systems, which would continue reporting to him directly, while Simo took over what he called the company’s “traditional” business functions as it scaled. Simo had already served on OpenAI’s board since March 2024, and her Instacart tenure was widely cited for improving the grocery-delivery company’s profitability before its 2023 IPO.
The appointment was one of a series of senior hires and organisational changes at OpenAI through 2025 as the company grew from a research lab into a large consumer and enterprise products business, and it marked a formal division between Altman’s own focus — research, compute infrastructure and safety — and the operational running of the company’s expanding application layer, including ChatGPT.