Instacart CEO: 100x Business Growth at OpenAI Is ‘Just the Beginning’

Instacart CEO Fidji Simo sees OpenAI growing its business more than 100-fold as the synergy among its different lines of business — foundational artificial intelligence (AI) models, applications and AI devices — supercharges the company in the coming years.

Speaking at the VivaTech 2025 conference in Paris — her first public interview since being named OpenAI’s CEO of applications in May — Simo said the opportunity for growth is “100x — and that’s just the beginning.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a post on X announcing her hiring, called Simo an “exceptional” candidate to help OpenAI “scale the next 10x or 100x.”

During a fireside chat on Thursday (June 12), Simo laid out a bold vision for how AI could become an “ambient layer” in everyday life, reshaping how billions of people work, learn, shop and manage their health.

Simo, who will officially join OpenAI in August, will report directly to Altman and lead the charge to translate the company’s cutting-edge research into mass-market applications.

“My team is really in charge of taking the incredible research breakthroughs that the company generates and really making sure that we distribute them to society in the best possible way, so that people see the benefits of AI,” said Simo, whom the interviewer called the most powerful French woman in tech. “That gets reflected into an empowerment in their lives.”

Simo said AI is going to empower everyone to “reclaim some of our time through productivity. It’s going to make us express our creative potential even more through all the creative tools. It’s going to allow us to get access to knowledge and wisdom that in the past was limited to the most fortunate among us. It’s going to allow us to gain power in many different ways.”

Simo joins OpenAI at a pivotal time. Its recent acquisition of io, the AI devices startup of former Apple designer Jony Ive — along with OpenAI’s foundation models, plus Simo leading applications — will create a multi-layered company with a diverse product line.

Simo brings to OpenAI a track record of consumer tech transformation. At Instacart, she said she took the pandemic-era food delivery company and rebuilt it into a data-rich platform powering the digital transformation of grocery shopping.

“When I joined (Instacart) in 2021, I had the luxury of being on the board for six months,” Simo said. “It was right after the peak of the pandemic, and a lot of people were wondering if grocery delivery was going to be just a fad or something really enduring.”

Instead, Simo saw a longer-term opportunity: help brick-and-mortar grocers digitize every aspect of their operations, from supply chain to advertising.

Under her leadership, Instacart launched a retail media network and AI-enhanced shopping tools, including the “Caper Cart” — a smart shopping cart that uses computer vision and AI to identify items as consumers add them while suggesting other products and offering them personalized promotions in real time.

Asked why fully automated stores like Amazon’s Go have not gained traction, Simo said that customers “do not want a store that’s completely devoid of people.” Instead, these technologies can help augment human labor. “It’s really the magic combo, and we see that as augmentation and not replacement.”

Internally, Simo spearheaded a company-wide AI adoption initiative at Instacart, pushing every team to identify repetitive tasks and explore AI solutions. The results: 87% of code written by engineers is now AI-assisted, marketing teams use AI to turn existing food images into videos and reused in new campaigns, the PR team used AI journalist personas to practice press interviews, and the legal team uses AI to parse through documents like contracts.

“The entire company is AI-enabled,” Simo said.

Read more: OpenAI Picks Instacart Chief Fidji Simo to Oversee Operations

Entering the Big Leagues

Simo’s new role at OpenAI positions her at the center of one of the most consequential companies in AI. While ChatGPT made AI into a household word, the future of OpenAI goes well beyond the chatbot and large language models, according to Simo.

“You can start thinking of AI as an ambient layer,” Simo said. “Not just enabled through GPT, but potentially through devices.”

OpenAI already touches hundreds of millions of users, but Simo believes there is growth potential in enabling “a team of agents at their service” — helping individuals in everything from education to healthcare and daily activities.

However, agentic AI, while full of promise, isn’t quite ready for prime time. A June 2025 PYMNTS Intelligence report said that “with adoption of generative artificial intelligence nearly universal across large companies, excitement is building around agentic AI, which goes one step further to make its own decisions and act fully autonomously.”

“Yet current GenAI implementations consistently require human oversight, raising questions over how agentic AI, a next-generation software that operates entirely free of humans, can reach its full potential,” the report added.

The report, “AI at the Crossroads: Agentic Ambitions Meet Operational Realities,” said at this stage, chief operating officers are still not ready for autonomous AI agents that can reliably perform high-risk tasks without human supervision.

Asked why so many enterprise AI efforts fail, Simo pointed to a common pitfall: implementing AI for its own sake. Companies need to start with problems they want to solve; every company has tasks that are tedious or repetitive that AI can tackle, she said.

At Instacart, Simo launched a framework that included AI training for employees and designated internal “advocates” to help teams adopt new tools. She said this approach could inform how OpenAI scales its own applications — embedding AI into real workflows and building the infrastructure for broad societal adoption.

Simo also brings a personal motivation to her work in AI. Diagnosed with a “pretty nasty” neuroimmune condition in 2020, she founded a research institute to collect health data in hopes of accelerating medical discoveries using AI. She sees AI’s near-term potential in democratizing access to health knowledge — helping the 90% of people who say they struggle to understand medical information.

As OpenAI prepares for its next wave of growth, Simo’s appointment signals a shift toward developing AI products for the mass market at scale.

“ChatGPT reaches hundreds of millions of people, but really, AI should change lives for everyone,” Simo said. “We need to be reaching billions. And then once you reach billions, you also need to make sure that each person can find value in multiple use cases.”

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