SILICON VALLEY — Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI, unveiled a strategy shift in March 2026 focusing on coding tools and enterprise users. Simo oversees nearly two-thirds of OpenAI after joining the company in August 2025 as CEO of Applications under CEO Sam Altman.

"We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," Simo said. "Everything else is going to have to take a backseat to those priorities."

Simo conducted a listening tour early in her tenure at OpenAI, meeting with more than 200 employees. "That really made the company feel like I wasn't jumping in with preconceived notions," Simo said. "Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy."

The strategy shift comes as OpenAI's coding tool Codex has reached more than 2 million weekly active users. In February 2026, competitor Anthropic reported that Claude Code's annualized revenue run rate was more than $2.5 billion and that weekly active users had doubled since January 1, 2026.

Simo, a former CEO of Instacart and longtime Meta executive, has recruited executives including former Facebook VP Vijaye Raji, Slack CEO Denise Dresser, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, and executives from Amazon, Shopify, and Instagram. The company's post-training team, which fine-tunes AI models after initial training, interfaces directly with Simo about research projects.

"This AI moment is so unique that there is really no blueprint for OpenAI to follow," said Karl Keirstead, a UBS analyst. After ChatGPT became widely used in 2023, OpenAI reorganized its research teams into two groups: one focused on product improvement and one on exploratory projects.

Deutsche Bank estimated that OpenAI is expected to incur $143 billion in losses between 2024 and 2029. A spokesperson for OpenAI said the Deutsche Bank estimate is incorrect.

In February 2026, OpenAI began testing advertising in ChatGPT. OpenAI also made organizational changes in 2025 and 2026, with Kevin Weil moving from Chief Product Officer to Vice President of Science and Srinivas Narayanan moving from Vice President of Engineering to Chief Technology Officer of B2B Applications.