Why Walmart’s CEO says AI won’t lead to lower headcount | Fortune

“When we look out two years, three years, five years, where I think we’ll be is we’ll have roughly the same number of people we have today,” Furner told Fortune’s Jason Del Rey at the Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah on Tuesday. But, he added, Walmart will have a larger business, meaning that employees on payroll at the largest U.S. employer will be on a per capita basis more productive than now.

Last year, Walmart U.S.’s revenue rose 4.7% to $462.42 billion as it took share from rivals like Target and Kroger. And last month, the retailer said it now expected U.S. sales growth of as much as 4.75% for the full fiscal year underway on the strength of a blistering first quarter.

Concretely, though the same headcount at a higher sales line that means many jobs will effectively disappear. But, Furner says, many old roles will be replaced by news ones within Walmart. He cited as an example a general manager called Maurice in Brooksville, Florida. This employee spent two decades or so loading trucks, but now, Furner said, he’s leading a team of bot techs and his work including circuit boards, and changing batteries out.

“We’re extending people’s career and those jobs pay better. The attrition rates are really low,” Furner said at the conference. To entice workers to embrace A.I. and see it as a path to job growth and opportunity, Walmart has announced a certification program with Open AI.

Another way AI is changing how Walmart store employees go about their day: an agent quickly makes a detailed list of the tasks to be done on a shift, something that used to take someone 30 to 45 minutes a day. “Now, when they come in, they say ‘Here’s who is going to be in the building this evening. Here the
most important things we can do. We have a suggestion for assignments,’” says Furner.

There are also agents who advise Walmart’s marketplace sellers and yet others that work with Walmart merchants to provide information on what to stock, what to curate, and where to place it in the store, reducing the time needed to executive those tasks in the pre-AI world.

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