OpenAI Hires Uber's Jill Hazelbaker to Run Corporate Affairs

OpenAI announced on November 3, 2026 that Jill Hazelbaker will join from Uber as Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, a role that hands her worldwide communications and the company's corporate positioning in a single remit.

For comms practitioners, the interesting part isn't just the hire. It's the shape of the job. OpenAI has welded public messaging, corporate positioning and — explicitly — public trust into one portfolio, and staffed it with someone whose career runs through political campaigns, Google, Snap and a decade at Uber managing regulators on four continents.

What does the role actually cover?

According to OpenAI, Hazelbaker will work with leaders across the company on improving public understanding of AI and building trust in its mission. The appointment also adds what the company calls "leadership and capacity for deeper engagement with the people and institutions influencing AI's future."

Translate that from press-release language and you get two workstreams:

• Outbound: worldwide communications and corporate positioning, run as one function rather than split between comms and policy shops.
• Inbound: engagement with governments, institutions and other actors who will shape how AI gets regulated and adopted.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's co-founder and president, framed the stakes in a statement: "As AI becomes part of more people's lives, how we communicate, engage, and earn public trust has never been more important." He also said Hazelbaker brings the judgment and leadership experience needed for "both the opportunities and obligations" of building technology used around the world.

The takeaway: OpenAI is treating public trust as an operating function with a named executive owner, not a PR byproduct.

Why her Uber decade matters

Hazelbaker's most recent job at Uber was President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer — notably, the same title she now takes at OpenAI. Over roughly ten years she handled reputation management, complex regulatory fights and the organizational build-out that international expansion demanded. OpenAI credits her with helping turn Uber from an ambitious startup into one of the world's largest global technology platforms.

Her Uber remit stretched well beyond communications. Global comms, marketing, public policy, safety and people teams all reported into her; Uber's own leadership bio adds human resources, recruiting and real estate to the list. That's a portfolio spanning public messaging, regulatory engagement, workforce operations and even the company's buildings.

The parallel isn't subtle. Uber spent a decade arguing with mayors, regulators and skeptical publics city by city while scaling at speed. OpenAI faces a version of the same problem: a technology outrunning public understanding, with governments writing rules in real time.

What came before Uber?

Nearly two decades of advising tech companies and political leaders fill out the résumé:

• Leadership of communications and public policy at Snap.
• Senior Google roles covering worldwide corporate communications, communications across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and European government relations.
• National communications director and chief spokesperson for Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.
• Press secretary to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg during his 2009 re-election campaign, plus earlier leadership roles on local, state and national campaigns.

That mix — campaign politics, then corporate comms, then policy, then everything at once — is exactly the profile you'd assemble for a company whose hardest communications problems are political ones.

How does she frame the move?

Hazelbaker herself called AI "the most profound technological shift of our lifetime" and said building public trust has never been more consequential. She also said she welcomed the chance to work with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and the team they've assembled.

Agency-side and in-house teams should read this hire as a signal about where the market for senior comms talent is heading: toward combined affairs portfolios where communications, policy and trust sit under one executive with political instincts.

One line to remember: OpenAI just made trust-building a C-suite job with a campaign veteran in the chair.