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

OpenAI is planning to turn ChatGPT into a “super app”—an all-purpose AI interface that brings OpenAI’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 OpenAI’s core product platform for consumer, business, and developer customers.

At the VivaTech technology conference in Paris, Sottiaux told Fortune that the company planned to evolve ChatGPT 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 produ...