AI, according to people who should know
Let's start with the CEO of the largest employer in America.
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:
The anchors of NBC’s TODAY, completely bewildered by email addresses.
Bill Gates, trying to explain the concept of the Internet to a confounded and dismissive David Letterman.
Or else, this story from a print version of Newsweek in 1995: Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana.
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, McMilllon laid out what he thinks 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 recently, 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 leaders actually do, so that years from now people aren’t trotting out your anachronistic and skeptical reaction to the dawn of AI?
Reassure the people you work with — 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? We still have time to get ahead of this.
But less time than we did yesterday.
7 other things worth knowing
On cue after today’s main newsletter story: Walmart is forming a partnership with OpenAI to let shoppers buy its products directly within ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence chatbot. It is a signal by the biggest U.S. retailer that online shopping is going to become a totally different experience from the retail websites we are all used to. Within the next few months, U.S.-based ChatGPT users will be able to instantly buy Walmart products directly in ChatGPT. The products will include nearly everything available on Walmart’s website, except for fresh food. And Walmart+ members will still get their benefits such as free shipping when making purchases through ChatGPT. (WSJ)
So much has happened in the Middle East since we last published on Friday. Monday brought tears of joy and of pain in Israel and Gaza, as all of the living Israeli hostages and four of those who died in captivity were handed over by Hamas in exchange for the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners held by Israel. But as the ceasefire brokered by President Trump held on Tuesday, there were a number of unresolved issues testing his plan to turn it into a sustainable peace. (CBS News)
Late night talk show hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, often critics of President Trump, praised the president over the recent Gaza peace deal this week. “There is some good news out there, because today, thanks to Trump’s newly brokered ceasefire in Gaza, all living Israeli hostages and almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners have been released,” Colbert said Monday on CBS’s “The Late Show.” Trump on Monday visited the Middle East, where he met with Israeli hostage families and spoke at the Knesset in Jerusalem. He then traveled to Egypt for a peace deal signing ceremony. (The Hill)
At the two-week mark, Republicans and Democrats are bracing for a long government shutdown, with both parties seeing more upside in persisting with their conflicting demands. As a result, neither side is willing to give an inch in the standoff, now the fifth-longest shutdown in the country’s history. (NBC News)
Pete Hegseth‘s Defense Department has threatened to revoke press credentials of news organization that do not agree to restrictive new coverage rules. Now, more than three dozen news orgs have said they are refusing to sign on to. In a joint statement Tuesday, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, and Fox News (where Hegseth worked until January) — said they were not agreeing to the new rules. Previously, the New York Times, AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Politico, along with conservative-leaning outlets like Newsmax and the Washington Examiner, all said they would refuse the restrictions. (Variety)
For the first time, the average price paid for a new car in the United States is over $50,000. Prices rose 2.1% between August and September, and are up 3.6% year over year, the largest gain in two years. Meanwhile, the once-common $20,000 car is essentially gone from dealership lots. Many budget-focused Americans have shifted toward used vehicles or have chosen to keep existing cars longer. Data from S&P Global shows the average age of cars on American roads exceeds 12 years. (Yahoo Finance)
Remembering Diane Keaton, the iconic star of ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘The Godfather.’ (NPR)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
I want to say I am proud of the news outlets refusal to sign on to the restrictive new guidelines. But it begs the question: is this what the Trump administration wants them to do? If they refuse to sign on then the government will operate without any oversight by the press. This is Trumps' attempt to not just circumvent the constitution but to obliterate it.
I don't use AI, at least not knowingly. I find the Microsoft copilot thing to be very annoying. I think it will do more harm before it starts to do good. At my last job, I did use Chat GPT for some things, usually to write corporate documents. It always amazed me that my manager would dictate his text messages. I should probably start to use it more often but I still default to web browsers and search engines before I think of AI.
I was also around at the start of the computer revolution. We had memory typewriters, where you could save letters. Or dirty jokes, those were always a treat! I learned word processing on a dedicated word processor, WANG and AES. Lived through the floppy disk era, still have a few somewhere. Was always keen to learn more but now not so much. Maybe if I was still really in the world of work, it would be a different story.