Glen Coates will lead OpenAI's application platform and help turn ChatGPT into an operating system.
The head of Shopify's core product is leaving the company after nearly seven years to join ChatGPT maker OpenAI and lead its app development.
New York-based Glen Coates, who was vice president (VP) and head of core product for the Canadian e-commerce giant, has announced his new role. on social networks on Monday. Coates will lead OpenAI's application platform and will be tasked with turning ChatGPT into an operating system, he said.
Coates will lead OpenAI's application platform and will be tasked with turning ChatGPT into an operating system.
“We're going to find out what would happen if you built an operating system from scratch, with a genius at its core who could use its applications just like you,” Coates wrote in his article. Post on LinkedInwhere he thanked his colleagues at Shopify. “I can’t think of anything more interesting to work with.”
Coates joined Shopify in 2019 as chief product officer for Shopify Plus—a platform for large, high-growth merchants—when the firm acquired its wholesale e-commerce startup Shake hands with your team. He was then promoted to Vice President and Head of Core Product in 2020, where he was responsible for Shopify's core software and app ecosystem.
Coates was recently public figure Shopify product updates, including Winter Editions '25 released last week. It contains over 150 product updates across the platform, many of which are aimed at integrating and improving AI features for merchants. These include agent storefronts—an AI-powered, updated version of Shopify's Sidekick assistant—and automation tools, such as a program to send an email to staff when a certain inventory level is reached.
In an email today, Shopify spokesperson Rachel Hensley said Vanessa Lee is now Shopify's product lead. She directed BetaKit to Lee. Post on LinkedIn and noted that she has been in this role for five months.
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Shopify sells e-commerce software solutions to both small and large businesses. Its market capitalization is C$300 billion, just above the Royal Bank of Canada as the country's most valuable publicly traded company.
OpenAI is Negotiations are reportedly underway to raise US$10 billion from Amazon at a valuation of over US$500 billion as the company looks to purchase more computing resources to run the large language models (LLMs) on which ChatGPT is based.
Coates' departure from Shopify comes after a dramatic change in leadership at the company. Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatyan left the company became CEO of San Francisco-based real estate technology company Opendoor in September and took on his “deputy” Vice President of Operations along with him. Shopify General Counsel Jess Hertz took Nejatyan's place a month later, Chief Revenue Officer Bobby Morrison also left. Shopify also made job cuts in recent months it said it had “removed the layers that created complexity” and had fewer than 80 people.
Disclosure: BetaKit's majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Image provided Shopify.
