Technology Quotes

I think no one knows how this is going to play out exactly. And the way it feels to me is that basically every job gets changed. And I think the best way to think about it is getting "plussed up." So how can I lean in the role that I have, regardless what that role is, to adopt new tools, leverage them and make things better than they would've otherwise been?

As I look across our company, we have everything from store associates to supply chain associates. Of the 2.1 million people (globally), something less than 75,000 of them are home office jobs. All the other ones are working in a store, a club, a distribution center. And I think those jobs change more gradually. We are still going to want to serve customers and members with people. The change as it relates to the home office jobs probably happens faster.

One of the biggest areas of change in the last decade is related to associates that work in our stores, picking orders for delivery and pickup for our customers. And we have something north of 200,000 people doing that job, and yet we have about the same (total) number of people working in Walmart U.S.

Other tasks and other jobs changed, which enabled us to create new jobs that paid more and have fewer of the older jobs that went away. 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.

I think most Americans probably don't know what a tech makes that helps take care of our stores and clubs and that we can help them learn how to be a tech. The same thing's true for our drivers. So we have a need to get the word out so that people know there are some great jobs.

I think as we all work to learn and navigate the future towards a world where AI fulfills its promise, the best way to do that is to work together and to share information and learn together. It'll speed up our ability to get ahead of this so that we can do a better job of setting our associates up for success.

Workers in every type of role must be prepared to adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace.

There are all these things that add up into this business that's Walmart that keeps it really interesting. At the root of it all, though, it's a people business and it's a merchandising business. Today, it's increasingly a technology business. The supply chain is critical, of course, and real estate still plays a key role.

I think we've seen it all. The e-commerce store is the interesting one.

As it relates to brick-and-mortar, we've seen it all and done it all. We operate around the world in different formats, different brands. We've got large stores, small stores, all these different formats. So we know that space pretty well, but the e-commerce business was different.

Retail is detail, and that plays out throughout the international business as well. Today's portfolio has got omnichannel businesses in Mexico, Central America, Canada, China, but we also have an e-commerce marketplace in India with Flipkart and our financial services business in India, PhonePe - those are a bit different, but the other markets have a lot of commonality strategically.

If you fast-forward through the years, there was a period of time when there was too much debate inside the company about the significance of e-commerce, there were leaders who believed it would never be any bigger than the catalog business, there were leaders that believed it would never be profitable.

Always thinking about the customer value proposition is including price, assortment, experience, and trust, and all of those have been changed by technology and been changed by e-commerce, and so leading up to the moment when I took this role, there was an understanding that we needed to invest in e-commerce, grow e-commerce, but we didn't take it seriously enough.

The stores are an asset, and they have a great assortment in them and they're close to people. Being within 10 miles of 90% of America is a huge advantage, especially with fresh food at a good price. But we must also, if you think long-term and you think about what the company wants to accomplish, you must have a big and important first-party e-commerce business, and you must have a marketplace, and the things that go along with the marketplace.

By the time we got to 2020, we had leaders that had a stronger digital acumen, e-commerce set of capabilities and beliefs.

E-commerce had become so big and the plan was moving along such that you can't undo it now, you can make it better, you can plus it up, you can find some synergies and remove some of the older problems we had of the separation, but it created some newer problems and some complexity on how you actually integrate a supply chain, for example.

People were wondering, "How do you even do food e-commerce? Are we going to be dropping strawberries on somebody's doorstep? It doesn't feel like we're going to be doing that". But what we believed is that in the US pickup might work. So we started in California and then Denver, and a team started working to put everything in place to do grocery pickup and in the beginning we even had a separate app. It was an orange online grocery app.

It was always the plan to bring things together, but just like the structure, it needed to be separate for a while for good reasons. We couldn't pick at store level the full Supercenter for a while. It's a lot harder to receive an e-commerce order and pick a toy at Christmas on time than it is to pick the strawberries every day, because you know where they are.

We love basket businesses, the Supercenter is a basket business, Sam's Club is a big basket business. We want to build an e-commerce business that's a basket business, not just a spear fishing exercise.

We've actually set the tech priorities driven off what we want to build for customers and what they're asking us to solve, and that's how it's going to be, and that is a cultural tension even today because we actually want some of both, we want ownership.