OpenAI hired a wave of powerful female executives. Two years later, almost all are gone

OpenAI spent the last couple of years doing what a lot of fast-growing AI companies do once the money starts to get serious: it hired executives who knew how to turn hype into a business. Many of those hires were women. Fidji Simo came in to run commercial applications and later much of the business. Sarah Friar joined to get the company ready for an IPO. Kate Rouch became CMO. Denise Dresser, the former Slack CEO, was brought in as chief revenue officer.

Now that wave has mostly washed out. Friar is the only one still in her original OpenAI role. Simo and Rouch left for health reasons, though Simo remains an adviser. And Dresser is stepping down less than a year after joining, with the Wall Street Journal saying she is leaving to pursue other opportunities. OpenAI has already named Wiz president and COO Dali Rajic as her replacement.

The company is also shifting the center of gravity around those departures. After Simo left, Greg Brockman took over many of her responsibilities, with some pieces going to chief strategy officer Jason Kwon and others to Friar. Brockman said Rajic will help turn what OpenAI has learned into “repeatable execution” as it builds the system to make AI broadly useful for people and businesses. That’s a very corporate sentence for a company that used to sound more like a lab than a sales machine.

The churn hasn’t been limited to women, either. COO Brad Lightcap announced his exit last week. But the symbolism still stings, because these hires once looked like a sign that this corner of Big Tech might work differently. The company still has female leaders lower down, including Ashley Alexander and Joy Jiao, and women still run finance at plenty of major AI firms. Yet the top rung at OpenAI looks a lot less mixed than it did not long ago.