OpenAI hires Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to oversee customer-facing apps

OpenAI was founded a decade ago with a focus on research, but it has since expanded into products and infrastructure. Now it is looking to again broaden its presence into user-facing apps.

The company announced this week that Fidji Simo will join as CEO of applications, a newly-created position.

Simo is the current CEO and chair at grocery delivery company Instacart. She will begin her new role at OpenAI later this year, reporting directly to Sam Altman, who will remain overall CEO and oversee research, compute, and applications.

In creating this new position, OpenAI is signaling its move from a pure research lab to a full-stack company with a deeper focus on building out applications around its models, scaling enterprise offerings, and interacting more closely with end users.

“This helps bring a focus to more specific applications and use cases for OpenAI,” said Jimmie Lee, founder and CEO at JLEE and Associates. “Overall, the shift is now to operationalization, rather than just be a product-led, innovation-led company. Now it can focus more on sales-led growth with a specific roadmap and strategy centered around the user.”

Moving from research to more productized offerings

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit research lab in 2015, but has since evolved into a product company with its growing family of ChatGPT models, as well as an infrastructure company, notably with the $500 billion Stargate Project to build out its data centers.

The company’s applications division brings together business and operations teams that turn OpenAI’s research into products used by enterprises worldwide. In her new role, Altman wrote in a blog post this week, Simo will focus on “enabling our ‘traditional’ company functions to scale as we enter a next phase of growth.”

He noted that Simo brings a “rare blend of leadership, product and operational expertise.”

The new CEO of operations has been on OpenAI’s board since March 2024. She was head of Instacart when the company went public in 2023 and was integral to the growth of its advertising business. Previous to Instacart, she was VP at Facebook/Meta overseeing the Facebook App, after leading key Facebook products including Ads, Marketplace and Video.

“Her background at Meta and Instacart shows deep experience in scaling digital platforms, optimizing user engagement, and monetizing at scale,” said Kaveh Vahdat, founder and president of RiseOpp, a fractional CMO and SEO services company.

The hire seems to signal an intent to mature OpenAI’s application strategy beyond ChatGPT into a broader suite of user-facing tools, likely aimed at both consumer and enterprise markets, he noted. “For enterprise buyers, this may indicate that OpenAI’s roadmap will involve more structured, productized offerings rather than raw API access alone.”

Prioritizing user experience

OpenAI’s decision to hire a senior executive from a digital-only customer-facing business shows a strategic pivot that prioritizes customer and user experience, said Manish Jain, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.

“In the competitive genAI landscape, it seems to reflect the realization that customer satisfaction and usability have become a differentiation across channels of its offerings,” he said. “This move may intend to put user needs and preferences at the center of their development roadmap.”

However, he noted, while Simo’s experience at Instacart and Facebook could make her the top person at OpenAI who deeply understands customers and their needs and wants, it is yet to be seen if that can also help foster public trust and deliver products that do public good, a point the non-profit has been driving home recently.

“Even though it is a significant development in the governance of OpenAI, I’d like to wait and see how significant an impact it may have on the direction OpenAI is taking,” said Jain.