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Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said AI will "change literally every job."
That doesn't mean that huge layoffs are inevitable, however.
Recent data shows that AI could transform more jobs than it replaces.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon has good news and bad news for the more than two million global workers employed by his company. The bad news is that AI is rapidly going to transform all of those employees' roles, and soon. The good news is that, in his view, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be out of a job.
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Speaking at a conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Walmart's headquarters, last week, McMillon told the audience that it's by now "very clear that AI is going to change literally every job," according to a Friday report from The Wall Street Journal.
Walmart is the largest employer in the world, so when McMillon unequivocally declares his conviction that AI is going to reshape his company from the ground up, that's a vision for the future with ramifications that will be felt by millions of workers globally, at every rung of the socioeconomic ladder.
Unilateral automation
Thus far, many predictions about the potential for AI to transform the job market have focused on white-collar jobs, especially software engineering.
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It's true that the growing availability and sophistication of AI coding tools does seem to be one of the factors that's been making it more difficult for young computer science grads to find work in the tech industry. At the same time, however, the race among tech companies to build ever-more powerful AI models has also sparked a talent war that has hugely inflated the salaries of some of the industry's more established engineers.
Some new AI tools, especially those that are designed to generate video, could also replace many creative roles in industries like filmmaking and advertising.
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McMillon's prediction, however, paints a much more unilateral and democratic picture of the future of AI-powered automation: it isn't just salaried office workers who will feel the effects of AI, but also warehouse workers, checkout cashiers, and millions of others, many of whom are already working paycheck-to-paycheck.
The AI chasm
That said, his vision for the future is more about transformation than replacement. In his view, as business leaders rush to onboard new AI tools, they also have a responsibility to provide the requisite upskilling to workers.
"We've got to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side," he said at the Bentonville conference.
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This language portrays AI not as a giant ax that will cleave many workers from their livelihoods, but as a moment of societal change -- a chasm which executives should help their employees cross safely. In the absence of robust federal oversight of AI, the onus of responsibility for managing the technology's impacts upon the labor market will likely fall disproportionately on employers' shoulders; The Trump administration's AI Action Plan, a set of policies released earlier this summer, emphasized AI upskilling without outlining any protections for workers displaced by the technology.
McMillon's stance is supported by recent data from Indeed, which indicates that AI is transforming specific job requirements more than it's replacing jobs themselves. Similarly, a recent report shared exclusively with ZDNET found that only 11% of executives surveyed believe that AI will significantly reduce their workforce, while 84% said they expect the technology to alter the nature of existing roles within their companies.
Elsewhere, recent research from OpenAI found several frontier models performed competitively with human experts on economically viable work tasks that contribute to US GDP.
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In that same vein, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon (the second-biggest employer in the world) recently told CNBC that AI will lead to "fewer people doing some of the jobs," while also creating new ones.