OpenAI’s Sophie Rose Joins Brij’s Board After Two-Year Reunion

OpenAI GTM specialist Sophie Rose has joined the advisory board of Brij, the AI-powered omnichannel marketing platform for retail brands. The appointment, announced by Brij CEO Kait Stephens in a LinkedIn post on June 28, closes a two-year arc that began with Stephens trying to hire Rose as Brij’s Chief of Staff before she took an offer from OpenAI instead. The same post carries Rose’s framing on how brands should think about data in the agent era.

The Reunion Two Years in the Making

Stephens opened the post with a piece of recruiting history. Two years ago, Stephens was deep in the interview process with Rose for the Chief of Staff role at Brij. Rose called to say she had just received an offer from OpenAI. Stephens’s reaction, in her own words: “That’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. You obviously have to take it.”

Rose took it. She became one of OpenAI’s earliest GTM hires, moved from New York to San Francisco, and helped launch ChatGPT Enterprise globally. Stephens and Rose kept comparing notes on the same intersection of commerce and AI over the next two years.

When Brij started building its advisory board, Rose was one of the first names Stephens called. The arrangement landed in a different role.

The arc, in five steps:

1. Two years ago: Stephens interviews Rose for Brij’s Chief of Staff role; Rose accepts an OpenAI offer instead.
2. September 2023: Rose joins OpenAI as one of the company’s earliest GTM hires, moving from New York to San Francisco.
3. After joining: Rose helps launch ChatGPT Enterprise globally.
4. July 2025: Business Insider publishes Rose’s first-person essay about the cold LinkedIn message that started it all.
5. June 28, 2026: Rose joins Brij’s advisory board, reconnecting with Stephens in a different role.

From Cold DM to ChatGPT Enterprise Launch

Rose’s route to OpenAI started with a direct message on LinkedIn. In Rose’s first-person account of her cold LinkedIn outreach, published in July 2025, she described spotting a post from a leader on OpenAI’s GTM team advertising a founding account associate role in San Francisco. Rose was working at an early-stage conversational AI startup in New York at the time, a company she has said was not growing and did not have the trajectory she wanted. She sent a short, direct note congratulating the hiring manager on her role, flagging her interest, and offering to relocate.

Within five weeks of that cold outreach, Rose had an offer in hand. She broke her New York apartment lease, packed up with her husband, and moved to an apartment she had never seen in San Francisco. Her LinkedIn profile lists her GTM tenure at OpenAI as September 2023 to present, showing 2 years and 10 months on the profile. Before the early-stage startup, Rose spent 2019 to 2021 on PepsiCo’s Corporate Strategy team in Greater New York City. The path ran from a global consumer brand to a small startup to a frontier AI vendor, the three stops Stephens would cite when announcing the appointment.

What Brij Is and Why Stephens Wanted Rose

Brij is an AI-powered omnichannel marketing platform built around QR codes that let consumer brands collect first-party data from retail and online marketplace purchases. The platform is the product of a pandemic pivot.

Kait Stephens and Zack Morrison co-founded the original company, called Found, as a lost-and-found platform that created digital identities for physical products using QR codes. As retail moved omnichannel during COVID, the pair rebranded to Brij and shifted the focus to helping brands reconnect with consumers through QR codes on packaging and inserts. The rebrand happened out of Harvard Business School.

Stephens’s own path to Brij ran through Blackstone as an analyst, iStar as an investment associate, and PIMCO as a vice president and portfolio manager, where she spent three years as the firm’s retail expert. She left to attend Harvard Business School and worked a summer in product management and strategy at Airbnb. More detail on that arc sits in the founder profile of Brij CEO Kait Stephens. The launch of Brij, then still under the Found brand, was covered in June 2021 launch coverage of Brij’s QR-code platform as a one-touch product registration tool with Shopify integration.

The thesis has expanded since, but the core mechanic, a scan of a QR code that opens a direct line between brand and buyer, has stayed the same. Stephens has said on LinkedIn that Forbes named Brij one of the AI companies actually reshaping retail. Brij’s platform now serves brands across retail and online marketplace channels.

Rose’s Data Critique to the Brij Team

Stephens’s announcement contains a direct challenge Rose gave the Brij team on how brands should think about data, delivered from inside OpenAI. Rose’s words, as Stephens quoted them, are sharp.

Agentic tools and AI are challenging the foundation of data warehouses…You’re doing a disservice by trying to fit in the mold of the past when most businesses today are trying to figure out how to adapt to the present day agent era.

That passage is the announcement’s argument on data architecture for the agent era, delivered from inside OpenAI’s GTM team. Rose delivers it from inside the GTM team of the company that built the agent most enterprises are now trying to bolt onto those old warehouses. The appointment gives a small omnichannel platform a standing line into how a frontier AI vendor’s GTM team thinks enterprise deals should be built. Rose’s role at Brij is to do more than advise.

What Operators Get Out of a Chat Interface

Rose spelled out the practical upshot in the same exchange, putting it this way: “The value of a ChatGPT or a Claude is that it allows a non-data scientist, someone who doesn’t know SQL, doesn’t know how to query a data warehouse, to all of a sudden interact with data, make decisions on data, parse the data, and quickly take action.” Stephens, separately, made the operator-not-data-scientist case for Brij’s product: “If our value prop is access to data brands didn’t previously have, the win condition isn’t building a tool for data scientists. It’s building one any operator can pick up and use.”

The two quotes sit one paragraph apart in the announcement. Both frame the user as an operator rather than a data specialist. Rose delivers her version from inside OpenAI’s GTM team. Brij’s QR-code platform sits on the same first-party data layer Rose is describing.

The tools competing for that operator workflow, including OpenAI’s own and Anthropic’s Claude, are compared head-to-head in Claude Code versus OpenAI Codex in 2026. Rose’s appointment at Brij is the next concrete test of whether the operator-first argument holds up at retail scale. Stephens has said the platform is for the brand operator, not the data scientist.

Why an OpenAI Insider on a Retail Board Matters

Stephens framed the appointment as a rare combination of vantage points. “Before OpenAI, Sophie scaled go to market at early stage startups and started her career on PepsiCo’s Corporate Strategy team, so she’s lived this from the consumer brand side, the startup side, and now the AI vendor side,” Stephens wrote. “Few people sit at that intersection,” Stephens added. Rose, in her own words, has framed her role as helping Brij with GTM and AI-native wiring. The advisory role is structured around product and distribution, not a marquee badge.

Stephens’s language is also strategic. She described Rose as “helping us with GTM at our scale, and wiring Brij to be AI native from the ground up.” That puts Rose inside Brij’s product roadmap, not on a quarterly check-in list. For a small omnichannel platform, the relationship is a direct line into how a frontier AI vendor’s GTM team approaches enterprise deals.

That career run, by stop:

• Consumer brand: PepsiCo Corporate Strategy, 2019 to 2021.
• Startup: Early-stage conversational AI startup in New York, immediately before OpenAI.
• AI vendor: OpenAI GTM, September 2023 to present.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sophie Rose?

Rose is a member of OpenAI’s go-to-market team and one of the company’s earliest GTM hires. Her LinkedIn profile lists her GTM tenure as starting September 2023, and she helped launch ChatGPT Enterprise globally. She now partners with enterprises on AI adoption and go-to-market strategy and is based in San Francisco.

What is Brij?

Brij is an AI-powered omnichannel marketing platform that uses QR codes on product packaging and inserts to help consumer brands collect and activate first-party data from retail and online marketplace purchases. The company was originally called Found, co-founded by Kait Stephens and Zack Morrison, and rebranded to Brij during the pandemic.

Why is the advisory appointment notable?

Because Rose sits on OpenAI’s GTM team and brings an inside view of how a frontier AI vendor thinks about enterprise data architecture. Her public critique that agentic AI is “challenging the foundation of data warehouses” is one of the more concrete positions an OpenAI GTM staffer has offered to a retail audience. The pairing also reconnects Rose with Stephens, who first tried to hire Rose as Chief of Staff two years ago.

When was the appointment announced?

June 28, 2026, in a LinkedIn post by Brij CEO Kait Stephens.