Fidji Simo’s appointment as CEO of Applications at OpenAI marks a pivotal moment in the company’s evolution — and might be the “AI-powered e-commerce” signal sellers have been hoping for.
Simos Role in Sam Altman's Words
In a company wide statement shared on May 7th, 2025, Sam Altman announced Simo's role as CEO of Applications, explaining
“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. Serving as an OpenAI board member over the past year, Fidji has already contributed a great deal to our company. She will transition from her role at Instacart over the next few months and join OpenAI later this year.”
Rather than leading a vertical like shopping, Simo will oversee the Applications pillar — the bridge between OpenAI’s core research and the real-world tools and platforms that hundreds of millions of people now use, from ChatGPT to enterprise APIs.
Or in other words, “Applications” is not a vertical, but a foundational structure — the division responsible for converting breakthroughs into mass-scale utility, which includes e-commerce.
Why Her E-Commerce Experience Matters
Simo’s experience is highly relevant:
At eBay, she worked on local commerce initiatives during a time of transition from desktop to mobile and online-to-offline integrations (notably after eBay acquired Milo, a local product search engine).
At Facebook, she led News Feed monetization and helped architect the social commerce ecosystem that now powers Instagram Shopping and Facebook Marketplace.
At Instacart, she helped grow the company’s ad business to a $1B+ run rate, launched new B2B products like Connected Stores, and took the company public.
These roles honed her ability to scale digital platforms, connect supply chains to software, and integrate monetization without sacrificing user experience.
What This Means for the Future of AI-Powered Commerce
Simo’s appointment signals a deeper trend in AI consumerization.
At Azoma, we see this as part of the same arc that includes:
OpenAI launching ChatGPT’s memory and web browsing
Google adding personalized AI snapshots to shopping results in Gemini
The platforms are becoming more personal, more conversational — and more shoppable.
This is why we built Azoma: to help brands and retailers thrive in this LLM-native world. We enable merchants to optimize product data, images, and metadata for AI-first platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Amazon Rufus, and Shopify’s ecosystem. (And yes, we already integrate directly with Shopify.)
Final Thoughts
Fidji Simo’s new role means OpenAI is getting serious about productization, scale, and interface-level innovation — and consumer experiences will absolutely be part of that. This is about who will define how the average person interacts with AI every day. And with leaders like Simo at the helm — and tools like Azoma helping brands adapt — the AI-native future is arriving faster than we think.