Fidji Simo
Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
Sources
14 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,753 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
Sources
14 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,753 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Fidji Simo (born October 5, 1985) is a French-American technology executive. Since August 2025 she has led the product and commercial side of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, reporting to chief executive Sam Altman. She was hired as OpenAI's first "CEO of Applications," a title the company later changed to CEO of AGI Deployment.[1][2] Before OpenAI she was chief executive and chair of the grocery-technology company Instacart, which she took public in 2023, and earlier spent about a decade at Meta, where she rose to vice president and head of the flagship Facebook app.[1][3]
Simo is widely described as one of the most prominent French figures in the global technology and AI industries. She has appeared on Fortune's Most Powerful Women ranking and on TIME's list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.[1][4] The table below summarizes her principal roles.
| Period | Organization | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 to 2011 | eBay | Strategy team; local commerce and classifieds |
| 2011 to 2021 | Facebook (later Meta) | Advertising and product leadership; from 2019, VP and head of the Facebook app |
| 2021 to 2025 | Instacart | CEO (from August 2021); board chair (from 2023) |
| 2021 to present | Shopify | Board director |
| 2021 to present | Metrodora | Co-founder; president of the Metrodora Foundation |
| 2024 to 2025 | OpenAI | Board director |
| 2025 to present | OpenAI | CEO of Applications, later CEO of AGI Deployment |
Simo was born on October 5, 1985, in Sete, a fishing port on France's Mediterranean coast.[1] She grew up in a family of fishermen and has said she was the first member of her family to finish high school.[5] Severe seasickness kept her from joining the family trade; at the age of 20 she worked as a lobbyist for the fishing industry, often the only woman among retired fishermen.[5]
She went on to earn a master's degree in management from HEC Paris, one of France's leading business schools, and spent the final year of the program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management in the United States.[1][5] She has described that move to California, made with little money and limited English, as the start of her American career.[5]
After her studies, Simo joined eBay in 2007, spending about four years on the strategy team building local-commerce and classified-advertising businesses.[1] In 2011 she moved to Facebook, the company later renamed Meta, initially to lead advertising on the News Feed.[5] Over the next decade she became one of the company's most influential product leaders. She helped build Facebook's mobile advertising business during its pivotal shift from desktop computers to smartphones, was promoted to director of product in 2014, and later rose to vice president.[1][5]
Simo oversaw much of Facebook's push into video. Under her leadership the app introduced autoplay video, the live-streaming product Facebook Live, and, in 2017, the Facebook Watch video hub.[1] In 2019 she was named head of the Facebook app, the company's largest product, with responsibility spanning News Feed, Stories, Groups, Marketplace, Video, Gaming, News, Dating, and advertising.[5] She left the company in 2021 after roughly ten years.[1]
Reflecting on that period after she moved to OpenAI, Simo offered a pointed assessment of her former employer. She said the thing Meta did not do well was anticipating the risks its products would create in society, a lesson she has said now shapes how she approaches consumer AI.[4]
Simo joined the board of Instacart, the North American grocery-delivery and retail-technology company, in January 2021. That July the company named her chief executive, and she took the role in August, succeeding founder Apoorva Mehta.[1][3] She set out to broaden Instacart well beyond delivery, expanding its high-margin advertising business and selling e-commerce, fulfillment, and in-store technology to grocers as a service.[6]
In September 2023 Simo led Instacart's initial public offering on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker CART, ending one of the longest droughts in major U.S. technology listings.[6] The offering raised about $660 million and valued the company near $10 billion, well below the $39 billion private valuation it had reached during the 2021 funding boom, although Simo had steered the business to profitability ahead of the debut.[6] She had earlier been designated to become chair of the board, a role that took effect around the time of the listing as Mehta stepped off the board.[7]
On May 7, 2025, Simo announced she would leave the chief executive role for OpenAI while remaining Instacart's board chair through the transition.[3][8] Later that month Instacart named Chris Rogers, a former Apple executive who had served as its chief business officer, as her successor, effective August 15, 2025.[8]
Simo joined OpenAI's board of directors in March 2024.[1] On May 7, 2025, Altman announced that she would step off the board to take a newly created executive role as the company's first CEO of Applications, reporting to him. He said the arrangement would let him concentrate on research, compute, and safety as OpenAI worked toward what he called superintelligence.[2][3] Simo formally started on August 18, 2025.[9]
In the role she oversees the parts of OpenAI that sit outside Altman's research and infrastructure remit, bringing together the business and operating teams that turn the company's research into products for the public.[2] OpenAI later retitled the position CEO of AGI Deployment, describing it as leading all of the company's product and business functions, including engineering, sales, finance, marketing, communications and policy, legal, and people teams.[1]
An early priority was the safety of OpenAI's consumer products, which by late 2025 reached roughly 800 million weekly users of ChatGPT. Simo has called this a "very big responsibility" and oversaw the rollout of parental controls for teen accounts as well as work on age prediction intended to protect younger users.[4] She also led OpenAI's push into workforce training, including an expanded OpenAI Academy and a certification program, with the company pledging to certify 10 million Americans in AI skills by 2030.[10] She has laid out a 2026 product agenda centered on turning ChatGPT into a more proactive personal "super-assistant" spanning writing, learning, health, shopping, advice, and personal finance, backed by greater memory and personalization.[11]
In March 2026 Simo set out a plan to consolidate OpenAI's consumer software, merging the ChatGPT app with the Codex coding tool and the Atlas browser into a single application. She wrote that the company had been spreading its efforts across too many apps and stacks and needed to simplify.[11]
In early April 2026 OpenAI said Simo was taking medical leave. According to reporting on the move, president and co-founder Greg Brockman took over the product organization during her absence, while senior executives including the chief strategy, finance, and revenue officers shared oversight of business and operations.[12] In an internal memo, Simo tied the decision to her own health, saying she had postponed medical care to stay focused on the job and now needed to try new treatments to stabilize her condition.[12] She has spoken publicly about living with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a chronic disorder she has said took years to diagnose.[13]
Simo's interest in health care predates OpenAI. In October 2021, while running Instacart, she helped unveil Metrodora, a clinic and research institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, dedicated to neuroimmune disorders that disproportionately affect women.[14] Simo serves as president of the Metrodora Foundation, and the institute opened its clinic in 2023.[13] She has said the venture grew out of her own years-long search for a diagnosis, which ended when she learned she had POTS, and that the experience convinced her that many women's conditions are underdiagnosed and poorly understood.[13]
Simo is frequently named among the most influential French executives in technology and among the leading women in the industry. Fortune placed her on its 40 Under 40 list in 2016 and 2021, on its Most Powerful Women ranking in 2023, and on a 2023 list of innovators shaping the future of health.[1][4] CNBC included her among its Changemakers in 2024, and the San Francisco Business Times named her a Bay Area executive of the year. In 2025 TIME placed her on its TIME100 list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.[4]
Beyond her executive posts, Simo joined the board of Shopify in December 2021 and has previously served on the boards of the L.A. Dance Project and Cirque du Soleil.[1] Selected honors are listed below.
| Year | Recognition |
|---|---|
| 2016, 2021 | Fortune 40 Under 40 |
| 2023 | Fortune Most Powerful Women |
| 2023 | Fortune innovators shaping the future of health |
| 2024 | CNBC Changemakers |
| 2024 | San Francisco Business Times Bay Area executive of the year |
| 2025 | TIME100 Most Influential People in AI |