Meet Fidji Simo, Instacart's turnaround specialist now incharge of ChatGPT at OpenAI
Simo will be stepping into the new full-time role as CEO of Applications at OpenAI later this year. Applications is one of the three operational divisions at the Microsoft-backed startup, besides Research and Compute.
All three verticals will continue to be overseen by Sam Altman, who said that he would remain in his position as CEO of the company. Simo will report directly to Altman while OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, and CPO Kevin Weil will report to her, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The 39-year-old executive will be transitioning out of her role as head of the online grocery delivery platform over the next few months.
'Joining OpenAI at this critical moment is an incredible privilege and responsibility. This organisation has the potential of accelerating human potential at a pace never seen before and I am deeply committed to shaping these applications toward the public good,' Simo was quoted as saying by TechCrunch. In a post on X, she also clarified that she will continue to serve as chair of the Instacart board.
Simo's move to OpenAI was announced just days after the ChatGPT maker revealed it is scrapping its controversial plan to become a for-profit company. As part of OpenAI's latest governance plan, the non-profit board will retain control over the public benefit corporation and become a major shareholder in it.
'Applications brings together a group of existing business and operational teams responsible for how our research reaches and benefits the world, and Fidji is uniquely qualified to lead this group,' Altman wrote in a blog post, adding that Simo has already contributed a great deal to the company since joining OpenAI's board last year. She also sits on the board of Shopify.
so excited that @fidjissimo is joining openai in a new role: ceo of applications, reporting to me.
i'll remain ceo of openai, but in this new configuration i'll be able to increase my focus on research, compute, and safety.
these are critical as we approach superintelligence.
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 8, 2025
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
So, what is Simo's background and career history? Will it help her turn OpenAI's consumer products into key revenue drivers? What is likely to be on her agenda as the head of applications? Take a look.
Simo is originally from Sète, a small port city in the south of France. She grew up in a family of fishermen and was the first to graduate from high school, according to a report by Fortune.
When she was 20 years old, she interned as a lobbyist for the fishing industry, as per a 2019 report by Marie Claire. Simo has a master of management degree from the HEC Paris business school. She spent four years working as a strategy manager at e-commerce company eBay.
In 2011, Simo joined Facebook to run the company's advertising programme and launch ads on News Feed. A few years later, she became Facebook's director of product development and spearheaded the company's mobile-ad products. In 2019, Simo was chosen to be the head of the Facebook app, during which time she supervised the News Feed as well as Marketplace, Ads, Groups, Video, Stories, and more.
She helped monetise the Facebook app and build the tech giant's advertising business during her stint at Meta (formerly Facebook).
After joining Instacart's board in February 2021, Simo was tapped to be the CEO of the company a few months later. When she took over the reins as CEO, Instacart was facing intense competition from the likes of Amazon, Walmart and DoorDash. Its pandemic hyper-growth had stalled and valuations were collapsing.
But Simo successfully steered the company back to growth amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She is credited with transforming the delivery service into a retail tech giant with a profitable advertising business.
Under Simo's leadership, Instacart's self-serve advertising platform evolved from a basic ad offering to a retail media network that generated nearly $1 billion in annual revenue in 2024.
She oversaw the launches of Carrot Ads and Carrot Insights as part of a broader retail media strategy that reportedly led to the platform being used by over 220 retailer banners and more than 7,000 CPG brands. In January last year, Instacart started showing customers personalised ads on its AI-powered smart shopping carts in physical stores.
In 2023, Instacart became a publicly traded company with its IPO set at $30. It raised over $660 million at a valuation of $10 billion. Simo is considered to be the architect of Instacart's financial turnaround as she implemented various measures including freezing headcount, renegotiating cloud contracts, etc.
As for Instacart's AI strategy, Simo announced the launch of Smart Shop in March this year. Smart Shop is designed to offer a personalised shopping experience for customers by leveraging advanced machine learning to understand their shopping habits and identify patterns in their dietary preferences.
'I think with AI, we're going to have way more ability to connect a lot more data, to mine that data to find better insights, and then to use those insights to tell people how to change their behavior,' Simo said in a 2024 interview with Fortune.
Envisioning the use of AI in healthcare, Simo said at a conference, 'The beauty of AI is in the past, these data sets were very siloed, and even if you wanted to analyse a ton of genomics data, that was a huge endeavor that could take many months, let alone if you wanted to do it across all the data points I mentioned. But now, because we have these tools that allow us to analyse giant data sets, we're going to be able to understand patterns we couldn't understand before.'
In 2023, Simo founded the Metrodora Institute after being diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which is a disorder that reportedly affects the nervous system. Several doctors and neurologists had previously misdiagnosed her as a 'tired mom'.
Metrodora partners with patients to enroll them in research and gather various data points on them such as their genetics, immune profiling, reported symptoms, environment, etc.
Conversational shopping assistants and advertising tools are expected to be the next phase of AI development. Based on her past experience in retail media and advertising, Simo is uniquely positioned to build and expand OpenAI's offerings in this regard.
Last month, ChatGPT's search functionality was upgraded to provide an improved and personalised online shopping experience for users. Now, users who look for products online using the Search feature in ChatGPT will see images of products as well as details such as pricing and reviews. The AI-generated search results will also include direct links to websites where they can buy those products.
Aside from retail and advertising, Simo also brings monetisation expertise to the table as OpenAI looks to balance hyper-growth with rising compute costs.
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