Operating at the pace demanded by the artificial intelligence industry is no small feat. At OpenAI, an internal mechanism built around a single word—"friction"—gives employees a direct channel to cut through organizational red tape and unblock obstacles standing in the way of progress.

The system revolves around a dedicated email address, friction@openai.com, where any employee can report an internal bottleneck. The friction process carries the authority to override nearly anything a team is working on, often backed directly by CEO Sam Altman or President Greg Brockman.

The range of issues submitted to friction@ spans technical system failures, ineffective internal processes, and everyday workplace frustrations—such as a shortage of IT vending machines. OpenAI's leadership team triages every submission and advances those they consider actionable. In one instance, the company launched a pilot program to prioritize parking spots for employees with long commutes after complaints about full lots. On another occasion, employees requested a more reliable and scalable process for granting API credits.

When an issue is deemed sufficiently important, Altman or Brockman personally intervene to ensure it is resolved.

A former OpenAI employee who spoke with Fortune described the friction system as an effective tool for leadership to obtain ground-level feedback and prevent problems from festering. That capability has become increasingly critical as OpenAI's workforce is projected to exceed 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, spread across offices throughout the United States and internationally, per a Reuters report. Maintaining the velocity that distinguished OpenAI in its earlier, smaller days—when it was widely regarded as the field's most nimble operator—becomes a fundamentally different challenge at that scale, one that every fast-growing technology company must confront as it matures.

"It's a good thing—literally anybody can complain about big company bullsh*t directly to Sam and they can act on it," the former employee said. "If you want to ruthlessly cut through bureaucracy, you have to be ruthless about it."

Although the friction email address has existed at OpenAI for some time, the process gained real traction in the fall of 2025, when Fidji Simo joined the company as CEO of Applications. Simo, who had previously led Instacart as CEO through its public offering, brought operational scaling experience to a company confronting the complexities of rapid headcount growth. She opened her tenure with a three-month "listening tour" aimed at understanding the company's internal challenges and identifying solutions. A recurring theme in those conversations was the difficulty of maintaining speed and agility as the organization scaled.

"Companies rarely become bureaucratic all of a sudden," Simo told Fortune. "It happens one unnecessary meeting, one extra approval, one small frustration at a time. Each makes it only 1 or 2% harder to do your job, which is why they're easy to ignore, but those frictions compound."

Simo formalized the friction@ process. She assigned Irina Kofman, OpenAI's VP of strategic initiatives and operations, to monitor the inbox and ensure that selected issues were addressed. Simo also instituted a monthly, company-wide Slack update to track progress, signaling to employees that leadership was attentive to their concerns. Simo departed OpenAI in early July to focus on her health and her healthcare startup, but the friction@ process and its accompanying Slack updates have continued.

Despite the system's clear benefits and its embedded role in OpenAI's culture, not everyone embraces it.

A former OpenAI team leader, who reported being on the receiving end of "dozens" of friction emails over several years at the company, described the process as frequently disruptive—sometimes to the point of generating the very inefficiencies it was designed to eliminate.

"The individual who reports the issue probably thinks it's the single most important thing, but to teams like mine that are constantly underwater, under-resourced, and over-leveraged, it's the single most disruptive thing you could do," the former employee said.

At a company known for its demanding work culture—where long hours extending well past dinnertime are commonplace—friction emails can trigger unwelcome fire drills. "If Sam and Greg think something is worthy, if it's defensible, then essentially a 'friction' gets started, and the party who is responsible for the block is then more or less just told to shut up and do it," the person said. "It's no joke, a drop everything kind of deal."

Still, with competition intensifying in the race to develop and ship the most advanced AI models, eliminating every possible drag on speed remains paramount. In an industry where the interval between a leading model and a challenger can be measured in months, organizational velocity is treated by leadership as a competitive advantage on par with compute capacity and talent recruitment. Fire drills and company-wide "lockdowns" are widely accepted as part of working in the technology sector, as highlighted by past practices at companies like Facebook. In December, OpenAI declared an internal "code red" directing employees to intensify their focus on strategic product initiatives in order to counter advances by rivals including Google and Anthropic.

OpenAI's friction system echoes a well-known practice at Amazon, where founder Jeff Bezos famously forwarded customer complaints to responsible teams with a single question mark in the subject line—an escalation internally dubbed a "Jeff B." The receiving team was expected to investigate and remediate the issue immediately. OpenAI's friction@ address operates in the same spirit, though it is directed at internal bottlenecks rather than external customer complaints, as Business Insider has previously reported regarding the Amazon practice.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.