Workers in every type of role must be prepared to adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace, says Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, leader of the nation’s largest private employer.
“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” McMillon told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that published on Friday, adding: “Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it.”
McMillon joined other high-profile CEOs who have signaled plans to reduce their corporate workforces in the coming years as they integrate more AI tools and agents — a growing list that includes Amazon’s Andy Jassy and Ford’s Jim Farley. Walmart plans to freeze the company’s global headcount of 2.1 million workers for the next three years while still forecasting revenue growth the company says will come from wider adoption of AI technologies, according to the Journal.
McMillon expects white-collar office jobs to be among the first to be affected, as Walmart rolls out more AI-powered chatbots and other tools to handle tasks related to customer service and supply chain tracking.
Ultimately, even workers in Walmart stores and warehouses will eventually see more tasks taken on by AI tools, and those remaining workers will also need to be willing to embrace the new technologies to stay relevant, McMillon said in another recent interview, published Sunday by the Associated Press.
“I think no one knows how this is going to play out exactly,” he said, reiterating his expectation that “basically, every job gets changed.”
Workers need to get ‘plussed up,’ adapt to using AI at work
McMillon’s recommendation for how workers can best prepare for the age of AI at work is for them to familiarize themselves with new AI tools and technologies to become as efficient and productive as possible.
“I think the best way to think about it is getting ‘plussed up,'” he told the AP. “‘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 more and more companies expand their use of AI tools in the workplace, recruiters say they are specifically targeting prospective employees with the open-mindedness and adaptability to keep up with any fast-paced changes at work, according to a LinkedIn blog post published in February 2024.
The ability to use these new AI tools effectively and productively is already a major challenge for many workers. In a September survey of 1,150 full-time U.S. desk workers, conducted by BetterUp and Stanford University, 40% of respondents reported receiving AI-generated “workslop” — work produced by AI tools that “masquerades as productivity” but actually falls short of human-produced work and can typically take hours for a human worker to fix.
As much as skilled human workers are still needed to ensure new AI tools are integrated efficiently into companies’ workflows, humans surpass AI in terms of soft skills like communication and critical thinking that will make them valuable for the foreseeable future, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman told CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” in August.
″[Those skills] are important today. I think they’ll be just as important, if not more important [in the future],” said Garman.
McMillon agrees that human workers bring certain skills that Walmart will always need in a wide variety of roles, especially when it comes to communicating with customers. “Until we’re serving humanoid robots and they have the ability to spend money, we’re serving people,” McMillon said about customers’ preference to interact with human employees, according to the Journal. “We are going to put people in front of people.”
The most coveted workers will always be those with the flexibility to combine soft skills with technical skills, McMillon told the AP. He pointed to Walmart store managers as a prime example, as they have to communicate effectively with customers, sales associates and supply chain workers.
“Those skills that the store manager has are both human and technical,” involving communication and critical thinking along with the ability to implement AI tools that track everything from sales trends to supply chain logistics, McMillon said.
“I think the skills that we have as human beings are valuable,” said McMillon. “They always have been, and that’ll be even more true in the future.”
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