Inside Walmart’s biggest shake-up in years

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JOHN FURNER: What I find most rewarding is when I go to a store or a distribution center and meet somebody who has perhaps been in the United States for a few years, learned English at Walmart, became a citizen, and is now managing a $220 million business. It’s extraordinary. I get to come back to my family and tell them, “I got to see the American dream in action today.” In leadership, you can be frustrated when you get pushback, but it’s not pushback. They’re doing what we’ve asked them to do. Providing context, providing understanding, and maintaining alignment are really critical parts of landing change in a big organization. What’s helped me is being a part of the company for the last 33 years. I started working in a garden center in Bentonville part time as an average failed musician, I guess you could say. It doesn’t pay well.

JEFF BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. In today’s episode, Walmart President and CEO John Furner joins me to discuss how the influential retail giant is evolving in the age of AI and what’s coming next. This conversation took place live onstage as part of Masters of Scale 2026 Summit.

Copy LinkWhy Walmart is moving fast

Let’s dive in. John, when I think about a company the size of Walmart, I don’t think remarkable speed. I think more aircraft carrier than speedboat. You’ve been in the job for eight months. Within what felt like days, you had overhauled your C-suite. You had integrated a historically siloed tech stack. You moved with incredible velocity. Why, and how?

FURNER: Well, first, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. The way I think about it, the way we think about it, is the best time to make changes is when you have momentum, when you have strength. A phrase that I think about a lot is, the best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. And we have so many opportunities as we look forward into this era. You’ve talked about it all morning: the era of intelligence, the era of AI, how the world’s going to change. And we wanted to go into this period with the right people in the right roles. We have a great team of people, 2.2 million people around the world. And the leadership team that we have assembled is talented, dedicated to the mission of the company, and action-oriented. I think about what you said this morning: community, agency, and action. That really resonated with me, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Our associates around the world have more in common than we have differences. I was in China last week. I’m in Mexico in a couple of weeks. And I find people working the same way, trying to accomplish the same things. What we’re trying to do is ensure that the organization is positioned to take action. The world isn’t going to wait for us. Retail isn’t going to wait for us. The customer is going to move. The customer is going to change. So we’re trying to set ourselves up to ensure that over the next few years, we remain in a position of strength and, hopefully, position the company to be even stronger as the world continues to evolve.

BERMAN: I mean, John, that all sounds great, but I’ve worked in a couple of very big organizations, and they tend to be pretty resistant to fast change. New leadership comes in. There’s a lot of people who are sort of like, “Well, I’ll survive the new guy. He thinks he can do all this.” And I know you’ve been at the company a long time, and I want to get into your journey there, but how did you bring your team along with you on that velocity of change?

FURNER: Well, a lot of companies say the best ideas come from our people. That’s true. We have great ideas from associates all over. Every week, we have a session on Friday where we invite about 500 of our top leaders — this is in the U.S., by the way; we do it in other markets — to give us feedback and give us ideas. We want to be great listeners. We want to be great learners. But change does happen and, in many cases, has to happen from the top down. The bottom can’t change everything on the way up. We can listen, but the leadership has to align, and we have to work on the big things together and ensure that the organization is coming along at pace. You mentioned that, at times, things in big companies can be slow. Of course, there are bureaucracies that are set up, there are departments, there are silos. Things are built to last a long time. And when you make changes — we made a big change yesterday with our membership programs — it takes a lot of coordination in determining what we were going to do, how we were going to get there, and then, in the middle, a lot of management to ensure that we landed what we did yesterday. We brought together our membership proposition in Walmart+ and Sam’s Club+ so that if you buy one, you get the other. And you can imagine there are a lot of reasons why you would and why you wouldn’t, but ultimately it’s about ensuring that our customers, our members, the guests who come in to shop online or in stores, have access to the things that we’ve been able to provide for a long time. And it’s a great time to do that, again, from a position of strength.

BERMAN: What’s been the hardest part about going fast?

FURNER: You have to recognize that our people, in every organization, were hired to do a job, and they have incentives, they have metrics, they have things that they’re accountable to. What’s helped me is being a part of the company for the last 33 years. I started working in a garden center in Bentonville part time as an average failed musician, I guess you could say. It doesn’t pay well. In college, I needed to make ends meet. And having had the opportunity to be in a number of roles in the United States, in Sam’s Club, Walmart U.S. — I lived in China for a few years, I spent some time in Mexico — it does reinforce that there’s a need for empathy, and there’s a need to understand what people on the front line are going through, what executives are going through, and the different things they’re trying to work through. It’s a big, complex world, and the people we have in the organization, we’ve asked them to do something. In leadership, you can be frustrated when you get pushback, but it’s not pushback. They’re doing what we’ve asked them to do. So providing context, providing understanding and maintaining alignment is a really critical part of landing change in a big organization.

BERMAN: You may have heard something about this big AI thing that’s going on in the world.

FURNER: I have.

Copy LinkRecasting Walmart for the AI era

BERMAN: A little bit about that. I don’t think we necessarily think about Walmart as a tech-forward company, notwithstanding your size and everything that you do from a technological perspective. What have you done eight months into the job to reorient the company for this AI era?

FURNER: Well, what’s great about the company is we have a strong purpose that our founder left us with: to save people money and help people live better. That’s been true for a long time. And for years, Jeff, if you had asked me, “Can you tell me what it’s like being a part of Walmart? What does Walmart do?” I think my response would have been, “Well, how much time do you have?” Because it’s big, it’s complex, and we had to really tighten down how we describe the company. What we landed on — I love the way it came out — is people-led, tech-powered and omnichannel retail. Omnichannel retail is just a representation of the fact that we want to be really flexible in serving customers however they want to be served: at the counter, at the curb, at their home, in their refrigerator. And tech-powered is important. We think of technology as an enabler of making our people as successful as they can be in the shortest amount of time, and that goes back all the way to the ’70s and the ’80s. We were early adopters of a lot of technology in retail, and it’s a part of what we’ve done for a long time. And AI, for us, is an enabler. It enables customers to tell us in plain English what they want. We have customers who express their intent, and we try to understand the context of what they’re asking in their native language, and we can today, with technology, give back solutions that feel magical in some ways. It may be as simple as, “What is it for dinner tonight?” But if you think about the complexity of a customer saying, “I need dinner tonight. I want it to be tacos. There are four of us. It needs to be gluten-free,” those things they’re telling you are complicated. Then when you compare that to a catalog with, say, a billion items in it, and knowing where the inventory is and the pricing is, and having it to them in 25 minutes — if you’d asked me as a kid growing up in Arkansas whether I could push a button on a device and, 25 minutes later, have a fresh Roma tomato in my refrigerator, I don’t think I would’ve said yes. Well, we can do those things. And so we’re trying to step back and take a very human-led, human-centered approach to this and build tools at the pace that we need to, in a way that not only understands where the customer is headed and where the world is headed. A lot of times we say loyalty in retail is the absence of something better. So we have to be the organization that is always thinking about how we get to better and best for them. And this is a time — I heard it this morning — it’s a great time to be alive. It’s a great time to be in business because we can do things that we’ve dreamt of for a long time, and it’s real now.

BERMAN: Probably doesn’t hurt to have Sarah Friar on your board, also helping steer.

FURNER: Right.

BERMAN: John, you mentioned the press of a button, and that’s how, for the last 20-plus years, we’ve been thinking about it. But now, with the rise of Muse and Insight and all these other personal agents — to say nothing of what people build for themselves — it’s not just going to be at the press of a button. It’s going to be at the initiation of an agent. How is Walmart thinking about that?

FURNER: Yeah, it’s a great question. We’re thinking about the connection from the screen to the physical world, and I don’t want to step past understanding how we listen to the 275 million or so customers we serve every week and understand them at the individual level, think about what it is they’re trying to accomplish, and then bring it to life. The second half of that is what we feel is a unique opportunity for us. We have 2.2 million people around the world who wake up every day, come in and try to serve. And if we can remove friction for them, if we can give them the information that they need in their palm, if we can somehow get them the best next action they can take to make their operating unit and their team more successful, that’s powerful. And how that all comes together is pretty unique, all the way to aggregating deliveries and trying to do this in a way that respects the fact that we’re proud of being an everyday low-cost operator, that we’re trying to enable everyday low prices, and that we need to move faster. That’s where we started. One of the things that we’re doing over the next few weeks is launching agent profiles. So as a customer, whether it’s through your agent or our agent, you can delegate authority: what the agent can buy, or the spending limit. What we’re trying to do — and it’s back to what you said about communities — is create agency not only for industry and everyone in this room, but for our customers. They want to remain in control. Our associates want to remain in control. So if we can help customers have a profile, an account that we recognize — yes, it’s Jeff, but it’s an agent shopping on behalf of Jeff, and Jeff has asked that we keep spending limits to a certain amount or certain times a day — it’s like having a family member that you’ve given your credit card to. There may be limits. I know my kids in college have a card. It has a limit that’s different from mine. Around the 20th of the month, I get a phone call: “Hey, Dad,” and you know exactly where it’s going.

BERMAN: Yep.

FURNER: But we want to make sure that your agent, through the right protocol, talking to Walmart, can have the same experience that you would have, and that we would understand what it is you’re trying to accomplish, what you’re trying to buy. Then we want to bring together the best of all of our assets to be as flexible as we can for whatever is going on in your life. So we’re excited about that. It’s early in the journey. I think we’re all learning. It’s hard to say where the world will be in a year or two, but we’re trying to position our teams and our business in a way that, wherever the world is going, back to what I said before, we can get to where the customer wants to go and meet them in their community.

Copy LinkWhy human connection still matters in retail

BERMAN: And that’s a big announcement and a big step forward for Walmart and for your customers. I’ve got two kids in college as well, and I can see the benefit for me there, and I appreciate it. At the same time, Rabbi Sharon Brous will be on our stage later in the Summit. She wrote a remarkable book a couple of years ago called “The Amen Effect.” There’s an anecdote in the book about going to a grocery store and starting to head to the self-checkout line, then seeing the person standing at the cash register a couple of aisles over just waiting to help someone, with no one there. And she makes the choice to go over and engage with the human being, and makes a point of making eye contact and having a meaningful human interaction. We have a monster loneliness crisis in this country. We talk to each other less and less face to face. We know what happens when we engage online, or when we don’t engage at all. How do you think about balancing the opportunity and responsibility to create the best possible shopping experience and the range of options for customers, with Walmart as such a powerful gathering place for so many Americans?

FURNER: It’s a great question. Earlier, I heard you say something about big institutions, whether you trust big or not. What I hear so many times in markets all over the world, when you talk to customers, regardless of what they think of big institutions or even us, what they typically come back to, regardless of their opinion, is, “I really like my local store manager. I like my pharmacist.” In many cases, the health care professional that customers see most in their lifetime will be their pharmacist, and they feel a sense of personal connection. A lot of people decide to go into physical shopping locations, of all ages, by the way. It’s interesting. I’m finding my daughters in college and their friends enjoy physical shopping.

But there are times when they just want you to take care of things for them. So the flexibility matters, but the connection does matter. And with our associate group, we bring managers in three weeks a month, and we want them to know the company, but more importantly, we want them to know the people they’re working with, the organization they’re serving, and what it’s all on behalf of. That personal connection really matters. I’ll give you another example. Providing associates with tools so they can create their own destiny has been really rewarding in the last few years. In Canada earlier this year, I met a forklift driver named Michael who had basically written a script for himself on a bot platform that we put to work last December, and he told me he’s saving 15 to 18 minutes per day, per shift. You might think, “Well, that’s great,” but if you save 20 minutes a day, five days a week, every 10 years, you pick up a year of work. So he was looking at it as a way he could be more productive to help his team. Giving people those tools is wonderful. Or he can take the 15 to 20 minutes a day, and we can work together. We’re a very in-person business. We’re in the office. We make decisions quickly. Back to your first question, one of the ways we try to make sure we make decisions is that we have to know each other. We have to trust each other. Innovation happens at the speed of trust, and trust forms at the individual level, then it’s extended to the team level. It’s hard to trust people and know people if you’ve only seen them as a box on a screen. So things like this, getting people together, I find really valuable.

BERMAN: And in terms of the customer experience, do you actively think about Walmart as a third place after home and, decreasingly but still, work as one and two, and about creating an even warmer in-person experience for your customers? Is that part of how you balance this out?

FURNER: We do, and it is a balance. Obviously, we’re trying to provide people with more tools so they can be more productive. I remember when I started, some of the things that we would consider very basic took weeks to learn. Obviously, we want to try to put them in a position where they can get to proficiency quickly, but they need to know each other. They’re on a team, and they’re in it together. Things happen in the world and in society, and some of our teams go through things together that, frankly, I never went through as a store manager. When I was managing stores — and it was in North Carolina — I had a few things to do, which is a big store. There’s a lot to do in person. But these managers and teams are managing an e-commerce business. They are managing a delivery station. They’re managing a picking and stocking operation. They’re managing a supercenter. They’re doing all of it at once, and the world’s different. People have different ways to talk to them, express opinions or provide feedback. We always say feedback is a gift. But they’re receiving so many things, incoming in different ways. They really have to know each other, trust each other, rely on each other, and know that our job in the home office is to support them. I was in the Sam’s Club office yesterday when we made the membership announcement, and if you walk up to the building, it’s called Club Support. It’s not the home office. It’s designed to support the clubs and the membership clubs where the members interact with our associates and our team. So we provide a big support role for all of our people.

Copy LinkCreating mobility for frontline workers

BERMAN: You referenced starting at Walmart as an hourly wage worker, trying to pay some bills when the guitar playing wasn’t quite cutting it from the income perspective. I have to imagine, especially as a leader who talks about leading with empathy — which, let’s be candid, is a rare thing these days, and I’m grateful that you do — you must have a special understanding of what your 1.6 million employees in the U.S., 92-ish percent of whom are hourly wage workers, are struggling with right now.

FURNER: Yeah.

BERMAN: You must have a special understanding of the tension between continuing to provide low-cost goods to Americans, affordable goods to Americans as we face an affordability crisis, and also making sure that your people have the opportunity to live meaningful lives and earn a living wage. It seems like it’s kind of at the core of what you’re doing. How do you think about that?

FURNER: We do think, and we know from the last 10 or so years of early investments — early being 2015, when we made big investments in wages — that you can provide opportunity, invest in the customer experience, and return value to shareholders all at the same time. I’m really proud of the role that the leadership teams and the company have played, not only in deciding that, but in demonstrating that it’s possible. For our associates, what I find most rewarding is when I go to a store or a distribution center and meet somebody who has perhaps been in the United States a few years, learned English at Walmart, became a citizen, and is now managing a $220 million business. It’s extraordinary. I get to come back to my family and tell them, “I got to see the American dream in action today.” So many of those associates — about 80,000 — have taken certifications in AI. Our first to complete the certification is a 40-year associate named Darlene, who signed up early, took it, and was the first to get the certificate. Being in a position where you can decide to go to college at Walmart, and Walmart pays for your entire degree, is fantastic. I was with a store manager named Josh in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago. We’ve known each other five or six years, and he wanted to show me the photo of graduating from Purdue as a Live Better U student while managing the store in Phoenix. Those are the kind of opportunities that are real. They make a difference. Whether you start your career at Walmart and move on, join in the middle of your career, come toward the end of your career, or, like me, spend your entire career here, we want you to have a great experience. I think today we have about 85 or 86 CEOs in the U.S. who were Walmart associates at one point, and more than 100 over time. So we provide what I think we could describe as great opportunities to start with a good job and have a great career. And back to music, my dad was with Walmart, so of course I was never going to do what my dad did. I was a creative, and I went there for the summer and fell in love with it. So it turns out Dad was right. Hard to admit sometimes, but…

BERMAN: And you still play guitar.

FURNER: Still play guitar.

Copy LinkWhy stakeholder value starts with time

BERMAN: John, I spent the first decade of my career in public service, and when I came to the private sector, I had to ask all the dumb questions and read all the books and, with the rise of YouTube, got to watch and learn. One of the things that struck me is that 50-something years ago, this guy Milton Friedman wrote this thing, and all of a sudden it was shareholder supremacy, and we don’t think about our stakeholders on the same level as our shareholders. Thirty years and a gold watch feels dead. You are an example of someone who shows we can win and win. We can win for our shareholders and win for our stakeholders. Is that how you think about it? And if so, how do we get other CEOs to think more that way?

FURNER: Well, I think it starts with having a long-term perspective. Our company is 64 years old. I’m the sixth person to be in this position, and I won’t be in it forever. There’s a time when I can make a contribution, and when I’m gone, what I would hope is that the company is better positioned than it was the day I got here. It was positioned well when I started in this role. But it’s important to remember that it’s about opportunity. Seventy-five percent of our managers started as hourly associates, just like I did and my predecessor did. Anything is possible at Walmart. We have physicians, we have attorneys, we have pilots, we have merchandising associates, logistics associates. If you can think of it or dream of it, you can do it in our environment. We’re trying to create an environment where every associate feels empowered to help us build the future. We have the tools today where everyone can be a builder. I believe that’s true. We’ve democratized technologies in ways that we may not have even thought possible before 2022. Those things are real. And we start from the idea that we operate in the U.S. in 5,600 communities, and in more than 12,000 communities around the world. But the footprint is much larger than the retail markets we operate in. We have to think about suppliers and entrepreneurs who have opportunities to make and manufacture. How do they want to connect, as a new marketplace seller somewhere in the world, to groups of customers who could be inspired to buy their product and build with us? We have a long history of building businesses with other businesses, and I think there’s absolutely a path for us all to work together, do things we didn’t think were possible, and create real opportunities for real people all over the world.

BERMAN: I’m so grateful you think that way. You go to Allen + Company, you go to the other gatherings where the grand poobahs who run other massive companies are. I’m not confident they’re thinking the same way. What can we say to them? What can you do? What can other CEOs do? What can the folks in this room do to help them think that same way about their businesses?

FURNER: Well, something I said earlier: people-led, tech-powered. I love the phrase, I love the order, and I love our mission. I also love our core values. My role is to ensure that we adhere to those core values, build to them, and that they don’t change over time. Now, what we do and how we deliver can all change, and it should change. But respecting individuals, striving to be excellent, operating with integrity, and service to others — those are the four. Those should not change. My job every day is to wake up and serve more than a quarter-billion customers around the world, suppliers around the world, and ensure that our people are in the very best position they can be in to learn, grow, and adapt. We’re a learning organization. I think I’ve heard it all morning. I really like where you started: community, provide agency, and ensure that’s real on our behalf as a business and for our people, and then take action. This is ours to change, and it’s ours to shape. Again, where we started: organizations do what they do, and it takes leadership teams deciding to make meaningful changes for the long term.

BERMAN: Well, let’s go make meaningful change. John Furner, thank you.

FURNER: Thank you.