Bill Staples

Bill Staples is an American technology executive who became CEO of GitLab in 2024 or early 2025. His career before GitLab included senior product leadership roles at New Relic and Microsoft, where he was a Senior Vice President in the Office division, overseeing Microsoft Office product strategy. He brings a background in developer productivity tools and enterprise software, making him a considered choice to lead a company whose entire value proposition is accelerating software development teams.

At GitLab, Staples inherited a company that had gone public in 2021 on a vision of unified DevOps but was facing pressure to demonstrate AI differentiation against GitHub Copilot and other AI coding tools. His tenure has been defined by accelerating GitLab's AI product — GitLab Duo — and making the case to enterprise buyers that GitLab's integrated platform can out-execute point-solution AI coding assistants.

Staples is not widely known outside the developer tools ecosystem, but within it his May 2026 'Act 2' memo positioned him as the most direct CEO voice articulating how AI agents would structurally replace, not merely assist, software engineering teams. The memo circulated widely in tech circles and made GitLab a reference point in debates about AI's impact on software employment.

On 11 May 2026, Staples published a manifesto internally and publicly dubbed 'Act 2', declaring that GitLab would restructure its entire engineering organisation around AI agents. Where competitors offered AI coding assistance as a productivity multiplier for human engineers, Staples framed AI agents as the primary producers of code, with human engineers moving into orchestration and supervision roles.

The memo accompanied headcount reductions and was one of the most explicit CEO statements of the year about AI displacing software engineering roles, placing Staples at the centre of the industry's reckoning with AI-driven workforce restructuring.