No job is safe—not even the one that involves chasing rogue shopping carts across a Walmart parking lot.
That's the message Walmart (NYSE:WMT) CEO Doug McMillon delivered loud and clear at Harvard Business Review's Future of Business 2025 event last week. And if you think AI is only coming for white-collar desk jockeys, think again.
"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 was quoted as saying by Axios. It's not just tech teams and store managers getting a reboot—Walmart is looking at AI's reach from curb to C-suite.
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This isn't McMillon's first time sounding the alarm. "Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it," told The Wall Street Journal in September, "Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it." For a company that employs over 2.1 million people across 19 countries, that's not a throwaway line—it's a reality check.
The retail giant isn't just playing defense, either. It's going all-in. Walmart recently partnered with OpenAI to let customers use ChatGPT to plan meals, restock pantries, and even check out through a conversational interface. McMillon described it as a shift from static search bars to what he calls "agentic commerce"—a future where AI knows what you need before you ask. Shopping as we know it? Being rewritten in code.
But McMillon isn't pitching panic. He's pushing preparation. Walmart is ramping up training through its Walmart Academies to help employees not only keep up—but cash in. Workers will learn how to use AI tools, understand automation systems, and, in some cases, become certified techs who maintain the very machines changing their jobs. McMillon said these training efforts could eventually evolve into a profit center of their own.
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Still, it's clear: no role is too routine for reinvention. If AI is analyzing your shopping behavior, helping you decide what to eat, and scanning your groceries, why wouldn't it also be figuring out how to retrieve carts faster or restock shelves more efficiently?
"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 stated.
Walmart's edge, according to McMillon, won't come from inventing new AI systems but from mastering their use. "We're not a company that should be investing to build all this compute and invent the frontier," he said. "We need to be the best in the world at application."
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And that's the play: not building the robots, but making sure the robots work for Walmart. The company's already introduced an executive role to oversee AI transformation, hiring former Instacart and Uber exec Daniel Danker to lead the charge. The move signals what McMillon called a shift to "offense"—aggressively using AI to rewire operations, not just react to change.
For workers, it's a wake-up call. Whether you're behind a register or behind the wheel of a cart-pusher, McMillon's message is the same: change is not coming. It's here. And it has a barcode.
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