Here’s a fun, instructive, and ultimately very relevant rabbit hole. Spend a minute or two perusing some of the classic “supposedly expert people who were wildly skeptical about the concept of the Internet” moments from just before it took over everything. Examples:
Actually, let’s just quote from that one for a minute:
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
We can laugh about those responses today. But I find myself wondering if skeptics about how artificial intelligence is changing the world today might be doing something very similar.
‘Literally every job’
Reason for bringing this up: A series of timely interviews with Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who runs America’s largest private employer, and who just gave some of the most direct assessments we’ve heard yet from a major CEO about AI’s impact on employment.
“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” he told executives at Walmart’s Arkansas headquarters during a workforce conference, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. “Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it.”
Literally every job.
‘Getting plussed up’
In a separate interview with the Associated Press, McMillon laid out what this means in practice:
“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?”
By and large, McMillon said it’s his goal is to keep Walmart’s 2.1 million headcount at the same level at least over the next three years. But the mix of those jobs will change dramatically.
“We’ve got to do our homework, and so we don’t have those answers,” Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer, said at the same conference.
Of course, McMillon isn’t alone:
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a memo that he expects the company to reduce its corporate workforce in the coming years as it rolls out more AI tools. With about 1.5 million employees worldwide, Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the U.S.
- Ford CEO Jim Farley predicted that AI will eliminate about half of all white-collar jobs in the U.S., telling an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival: “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”
- JPMorgan Chase’s consumer banking chief told investors that operations staff would fall by at least 10 percent as the bank deploys its AI platform — a system that can create a five-page investment banking presentation in 30 seconds.
‘Default to AI’
Oh, and as my colleague Justin Bariso adroitly examined, at Opendoor, the real estate technology company, new CEO Kaz Nejatian sent a companywide memo establishing in which he said “Default to AI” as the first line in everyone’s job expectation.
And:
- “Starting with the next performance review, in addition to asking how much impact each employee delivered, we will also ask ourselves how frequently does each person default to AI.”
- “If you reach for Google Docs or Sheets before you reach for an AI tool, you are not defaulting to AI.”
- “If the prototype for a project is not built in Cursor or Claude Code, you are not defaulting to AI.”
- “If you have not used chat.opendoor.com and started thinking about how you can build your own agents and save your prompts, you are not defaulting to AI.”
This is anxiety-inducing stuff. So what should you actually do as a business owner, so that years from now people aren’t trotting out your anachronistic and skeptical reaction to the dawn of AI?
I think at least three things:
Reassure your employees — but be honest.
In short, transparency beats terror.
McMillon put it well: “Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side.” Talk to your team “real time about what we’re learning and what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” as he told the AP.
Recognize that if you’re not optimizing, your competitors are.
Nearly half of technology leaders say AI is “fully integrated” into their companies’ core business strategy. This train has left the station.
The question isn’t whether to adopt AI — it’s how quickly and how well.
Remember what AI cannot do.
At least for now, that includes genuine human relationships. McMillon made this point when he noted that companies have recently pitched robot workers to Walmart.
His response? “Until we’re serving humanoid robots and they have the ability to spend money, we’re serving people. We are going to put people in front of people.”
That’s the sweet spot: Using AI to handle the tasks it’s good at so humans can focus on what they’re uniquely good at.
The bottom line
Change is coming. Actually, scratch that — change is here.
The CEOs running the world’s largest companies aren’t sugarcoating it anymore. They’re telling us exactly what they see: AI is going to reshape every job, eliminate some positions, create others, and fundamentally change how we work.
The good news? You still have time to get ahead of this.
But less time than you did yesterday.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
Bill Murphy Jr.
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