Walmart’s 2.1 million global employees will need to brace for technology-led change.
Axios reported that Doug McMillon, the superstore chain’s CEO, expressed his opinion that AI will influence the way every job inside the company evolves over time in remarks at a Harvard Business Review event this week.
“Every job we’ve got is going to change in some way—whether it’s getting the shopping carts off the parking lot, or the way our technologists work or certainly the way leadership roles change,” McMillon reportedly said at the event.
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Unlike other CEOs of high-powered retail organizations, like Amazon, McMillon hasn’t come out and said that AI will cause the company to downsize its corporate headcount. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, said as much in a June memo to corporate employees.
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote at the time.
Amazon parted ways with 14,000 of its corporate employees last week, though it did not attribute the cuts to AI directly. The New York Times also reported that internal Amazon documents show that the e-tailer plans to cull its warehouse and fulfillment hiring plans because of the ever-increasing role of AI and automation in the supply chain.
McMillon previously told the Associated Press that it’s not yet clear how AI could impact the number of employees that Walmart keeps on its payroll. But his stance on job loss because of AI has been less bullish than other CEOs.
“I hope what happens as we lead through this is that there will be pluses and minuses, but the net ends up being even more people because we have more ideas of how to grow,” he told AP in late September.
The company has already invested in a partnership with OpenAI on AI-based training and upskilling for corporate employees. Donna Morris, its chief people officer, said that in early 2026, “frontline and office-based associates will have access to cutting-edge AI training” and noted that the employees will be able to complete an OpenAI Certifications program tailored for Walmart. The intent, the company said, is to help employees with the transition into an increasingly digital world while also appropriately leveraging AI in the workplace.
Axios reported that McMillon said Walmart’s upskilling strategy is meant to help it keep humans in the loop while expanding its business with the help of emerging technology.
“What we want to do is equip everybody to be able to make the most of the new tools that are available, learn, adapt, add value, drive growth—and still be a really large employer years from now,” McMillon reportedly said.
Walmart has spent years developing technology to meet its various business needs, from warehouse efficiency and route optimization, to conversational commerce, to quick-turnaround delivery and inventory optimization. In recent months, part of that strategy has extended to agentic AI, which—when deployed at scale—is meant to handle routine, mundane tasks autonomously with little input from human employees.
Typically, AI agents are best suited to handle tasks that rely heavily on data and process. Walmart has been developing agents behind the scenes and announced earlier this year that it would condense the number of agents its employees interact with on a regular basis, creating what it calls “super agents” to aid corporate employees with their day-to-day work. That means that, rather than navigating to five different agents to complete a single task, Walmart will help its employees interface with one agent that has myriad systems underneath it to support a variety of tasks in a specific business unit or vertical.
Some of these AI efforts come under the supervision of recently appointed Walmart AI executive Daniel Danker, whose tenure included Instacart and Uber.
More recent developments show that Walmart is interested in extending its external partnerships to change not only the way that its employees work but the way its customers shop. The retail giant announced last month that it would enable its consumers to buy items directly on ChatGPT’s shopping platform, through what the technology company calls Instant Checkout. Other e-commerce players, like Etsy and Shopify merchants Glossier, Spanx and Vuori are also on board with the initiative.
McMillon said that as AI continues to proliferate and impact the ways that people’s lives and daily activities work, Walmart needs to stay an active part of the transformation, even if that means relinquishing control of how that technology evolves.
“We’re not a company that should be investing to build all this compute and invent the frontier,” McMillon said, per Axios. “We need to be the best in the world at application.”
