OpenAI’s new ‘super app’ boss hopes to persuade users and potential IPO investors that the company is about way more than just chat

Open AI is planning to turn Chat GPT into a “super app”—an all-purpose AI interface that brings Open AI’s key products together—as it heads toward an upcoming IPO. At the center of that push is Thibault Sottiaux, the former head of Codex, who has recently been promoted to oversee Open AI’s core product platform for consumer, business, and developer customers. At the Viva Tech technology conference in Paris, Sottiaux told Fortune that the company planned to evolve Chat GPT from a conversational tool into a more personal assistant that remembers what users care about and gets better the more it learns from them. The end goal, he said, is a single, highly capable agent that can handle both simple requests and more complex tasks—from answering quick questions to planning a complex trip and then booking all the travel arrangements to spinning up a custom app to help their child learn trigonometry—all in one place. The company plans to merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified agentic experience. Over the past few months, it has been reorganizing its product leadership to achieve that. Product strategy is now under OpenAI president Greg Brockman with Sottiaux leading core product and platform, and Nick Turley—previously head of ChatGPT—moving to lead enterprise industries. The consolidation also came with the shutdown of various side projects, including Sora, its AI video product, which was discontinued in April. The company also pulled back from expensive infrastructure commitments, halting plans for Stargate data center projects in the UK and Norway. The push comes at a pivotal moment for OpenAI, which is eyeing a trillion-dollar IPO while trying to fend off fierce competition from rival AI lab Anthropic. The company’s likely IPO is part of a wave of AI companies heading for public markets in relatively quick succession, with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all targeting combined valuations that add up to more than $3.6 trillion. For OpenAI, the su