Walmart Tells Workers AI Will Improve Jobs, Not Cut Them

At its annual Associates Week gathering in Bentonville, Arkansas this week, Walmart told thousands of employees that artificial intelligence will deepen their skills and expand what they can do on the job. The world’s largest retailer, with about 1.6 million US workers and annual revenue past $700 billion, made that pitch to a workforce already running AI tools daily and set to earn formal OpenAI certification through its own training platform.

Three weeks earlier, Walmart cut approximately 1,000 positions across its global technology and product teams. The message came as Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the Chicago-based outplacement firm, reported AI as the leading stated reason for US job cuts for the third consecutive month. Whether training certifications change that dynamic is the question the company left unanswered.

The Bentonville Pitch

Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer, addressed thousands of employees at a rally during Associates Week. “Technology will power our future. But our associates will lead it,” she told workers, per the Financial Times. John Furner, who became chief executive in 2025 after succeeding Doug McMillon, addressed the crowd directly: “The chorus, the part we come back to time and time again, is that our people make a difference that matters.”

Executives ran through specific cases where AI is already reshaping daily work. A freight transportation manager built a system helping truck drivers identify the most efficient loads near the end of their workweeks, cutting unnecessary mileage and letting drivers spend more time at home. Self-checkout cameras are being trained to recognize produce without barcodes. AI tools now analyze customer feedback and give category-management buyers data on trending items by zip code, feeding purchasing decisions before products reach regional distribution.

Daniel Danker, Walmart’s executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design, focused on the supply chain. He described a future where an unexpected heatwave automatically triggers inventory preparations, so relevant products are staged for rapid delivery before customers begin searching for them. The system needs to read signals in weather data, local events and consumer search patterns, then translate them into distribution decisions before any stockout occurs. Danker, who joined from Instacart in July 2025 after serving as its chief product officer, was hired by Furner specifically to build that capability.

Associates Week draws employees from across Walmart’s US operations to Bentonville each year, the company’s largest annual internal gathering. Darlene Lane, a veteran associate with more than four decades at the company, told the gathering that late founder Sam Walton would likely have embraced the technology.

A $1 Billion Bet on Training

The certification Walmart announced this week runs through Squiggly, the company’s internal associate-facing platform, with credentials from both OpenAI and Google Gemini. By April 2026, the program was open to about 1.7 million workers in the US and Canada, with role-specific training designed to integrate agentic AI tools into each employee’s specific workflow. Josh Allen, Walmart’s group director of learning strategy, said the program will be tailored to each employee’s specific job and goals.

Speaking at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech AI summit in April 2026, Morris described Squiggly as Walmart’s vehicle for getting AI into hourly and salaried workers’ actual tasks. For a front-of-house worker, that can mean locating stockroom items faster or translating a customer conversation in real time. Walmart Academy, the retailer’s in-house training infrastructure with more than 3.5 million participants, handles delivery of the credentials. The company has committed nearly $1 billion to skills training through 2026, of which the OpenAI arrangement is part. Morris told associates in a note announcing the partnership that the training was designed “to help you at work and in your personal life in an increasingly digital world.”

The tools already running in the associate app include:

• A 44-language real-time translation feature enabling multilingual conversations with customers
• A task-prioritization assistant that reads workloads and recommends where to direct effort
• A conversational AI for procedural questions, such as how to process a return without a receipt
• Sparky, Walmart’s customer-facing shopping assistant, whose users spend roughly 35% more per order than average, per Walmart US leadership

Walmart’s global advertising revenue reached $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2026, a 46% increase year over year. Sparky’s basket-size performance feeds into Walmart Connect, the US retail media arm, which grew 41% in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026.

Jobs Cut While the Stage Was Being Built

In mid-May, an internal memo from Global Chief Technology Officer Suresh Kumar and Danker reached Walmart’s global technology and product teams. About 1,000 positions were affected, with some employees laid off and others asked to relocate to Bentonville or the company’s Northern California offices, according to a source familiar with the situation as reported by CIO Dive. The memo tied the change to Walmart’s consolidation of separate technology organizations for Walmart US, Sam’s Club and international markets into one shared global platform.

“In some cases, we’ve had different teams working on similar problems,” Kumar and Danker wrote.

Both the company and the source stated the restructure was not specifically tied to AI. A Walmart spokesperson declined to confirm the exact breakdown between layoffs and relocations. Impacted staff were given the option to relocate to either Bentonville or Northern California.

Both rounds fit the pattern across large US employers of unwinding post-pandemic corporate headcount that grew beyond sustainable operating levels. Those technology positions represent about 0.05% of Walmart’s roughly 2.1 million global employees, a figure the company has cited to keep scale in perspective.

AI as the Leading Reason to Let People Go

The US labor market picture as of May 2026, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s May 2026 workforce report:

• 87,714 US jobs attributed to AI through May, already surpassing the combined totals of all of 2024 and 2025
• 38,579 AI-linked layoffs in May alone, accounting for 40% of all job cuts announced that month
• AI ranked as the leading stated reason for US job cuts for the third consecutive month
• Tech-sector layoffs in 2026 running 65% above the same period of 2025, with 123,653 announced through May

“AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in the report.

In 2024, US employers cited AI in 12,742 announced cuts across the full year. Among companies that explicitly attributed reductions to the technology: Salesforce cut about 4,000 customer support roles across 2025 and into early 2026, with CEO Marc Benioff saying AI agents now handle roughly half of customer interactions. Block CEO Jack Dorsey, announcing the February 2026 elimination of about 4,000 jobs, wrote in a shareholder letter that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, publicly accused some employers of “AI washing,” using the technology as cover for reductions they would have made anyway. Challenger itself has noted that AI is claiming the budgets for eliminated roles more reliably than it is replacing the work, and US unemployment insurance claims stayed flat through May.

Walmart cut technology staff and then flew thousands of remaining employees to Bentonville to tell them the future looks bright.

Shareholders Rejected the Transparency Ask

Four days before Associates Week opened, Walmart held its 2026 annual shareholders’ meeting in a virtual-only format on June 4. United for Respect, a labor advocacy investor group, submitted a proposal asking Walmart to explain how it measures the effects of AI and automation on jobs, pay, training and equity across its 1.6 million US workers. Shareholders voted it down, following the Walmart board’s recommendation, with preliminary results confirming the outcome.

In its proxy statement, Walmart described proposals of this type as efforts to “use the company’s name recognition to draw attention to causes” and force it to take sides on sensitive issues. The board opposed it; shareholders voted accordingly. United for Respect, whose members include retail workers and investor advocates, argued that as Walmart rapidly deploys AI tools, the company should be required to document the technology’s effects on worker safety, compensation and job security. The board maintained the company already discloses sufficient information about its workforce strategy.

Ava Williams, an overnight worker at a Walmart in Spokane, Washington, spoke in favor of the proposal at the meeting. She said she had repeatedly tried to sound the alarm about what AI-driven performance standards were doing on the floor.

There is zero accountability for the tools that now impact our safety.

Williams said workers are sometimes pressured to skip critical steps, including sanitizing shelves and checking for expired products, to meet AI-generated timelines. “We’re expected to meet impossible timelines,” she said. “Injuries, burnout, and high turnover” have followed. Allen’s response at Associates Week: “AI learning should build confidence, not pressure.”

The company told the Financial Times it expects to remain a major employer despite automation advances, without specifying the metrics behind that expectation. The failed proposal means Walmart sets its own disclosure standard on what it tells the public about AI’s effects on its workforce.

The OpenAI certification goes live for 1.7 million US and Canada associates. After June 4, no external report on how it affects their injury rates, turnover or pay is required.