Walmart CEO Issues Wake-Up Call: 'AI Is Going to Change Literally Every Job' (msn.com)
- Reference: 0179552496
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/27/066218/walmart-ceo-issues-wake-up-call-ai-is-going-to-change-literally-every-job
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/walmart-ceo-issues-wake-up-call-ai-is-going-to-change-literally-every-job/ar-AA1NolbK
> "It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job," Chief Executive Doug McMillon said this week in one of the most pointed assessments to date from a big-company CEO on AI's likely impact on employment... "Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it."
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> Inside Walmart, top executives have started to examine AI's implications for its workforce in nearly every high-level planning meeting. Company leaders say they are tracking which job types decrease, increase and stay steady to gauge where additional training and preparation can help workers. "Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side," McMillon said. For now, Walmart executives say the transformation means the size of its global workforce will stay roughly flat even as its revenue climbs. It plans to maintain its head count of around 2.1 million global workers over the next three years, but the mix of those jobs will change significantly, said Donna Morris, Walmart's chief people officer. What the composition will look like remains murky... Already Walmart has built chat bots, which it calls "agents," for customers, suppliers and workers. It is also tracking an expanding share of its supply chain and product trends with AI...
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> Some changes are already rippling across the workforce. In recent years Walmart [3]has automated many of its warehouses with the help of AI-related technology, triggering some job cuts, executives said. Walmart is also looking to automate some back-of-store tasks. New roles have been established, too. Walmart, for example, created an "agent builder" position last month — an employee who builds AI tools to help merchants. It expects to add people in areas like home delivery or in high-touch customer positions, such as its bakeries. The company has also added more in-store maintenance technicians and truck drivers in recent years.
The article also a comment made by Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley earlier this summer. "Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/walmart-ceo-issues-wake-up-call-ai-is-going-to-change-literally-every-job/ar-AA1NolbK
[3] https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/inside-walmarts-warehouse-of-the-future-6f17d17a
A list of jobs that will not be affected by it: (Score:3)
AI will not change cooks. I have seen AI recipes, not helpful.
Which brings us to:
Waiters, Janitors, Masons, Electricians, Carpenters, Sommeliers, Wielders, Cashiers, and Farmers.
Re:A list of jobs that will not be affected by it: (Score:4, Interesting)
"It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job," Chief Executive Doug McMillon said this week in one of the most pointed assessments to date from a big-company CEO on AI's likely impact on employment... "Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it."
How about Walmart Greeter?
More seriously... while his statement might sound profound at first, it's merely stating the obvious. Technology and the Internet have already been dramatically changing "literally every job" for the past half century.
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> How about Walmart Greeter?
When the shoppers are all AI bots, I'm sure they'll prefer being greeted by their own kind.
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Weird. My takeaway about the obvious part of his statement is that he's pretty dumb. Anyone who thinks that something can't exist because they didn't think of it... (or even worse, because they didn't think of it in the allotted time that was approved to brainstorm the problem....)
...should not be taken seriously. The braincells you've expended on this have been wasted, I'm afraid. Live and learn ;0)
Re: A list of jobs that will not be affected by it (Score:2)
Didn't Walmart kill the greeter program 6 or 7 years ago?
Walmart customer host (Score:2)
Over time, the Walmart greeter's responsibilities expanded to what is now the "customer host" position. Because some of these new responsibilities were somewhat physical, some associates with disabilities were moved to self checkout host or other front-end positions.
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> AI will not change cooks. I have seen AI recipes, not helpful.
> Which brings us to:
> Waiters, Janitors, Masons, Electricians, Carpenters, Sommeliers, Wielders, Cashiers, and Farmers.
You're definitely not thinking abstract enough. Several of those have already been changed by AI.
You said AI will not change cooks yet you acknowledge that AI recipes exist. We've done this as an experiment one day, and ChatGPT prepared instructions for a perfectly reasonable hoisin Chicken and didn't even suggest using glue or bleach for anything. The internet is full of bad recipes, and AI can already provide something better. There are already "AI powered" kitchen appliances on the market, there are alre
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LOL. When you define everything to be AI, it's easy to claim that AI affects everything.
Delusional execs (Score:5, Insightful)
i haven't seen this level of global delusion in my entire life. the executives of every company are absolutely insane. they're blinded by the promise of a jump in efficiency, but dont know enough about the underlying technology to really understand how it can be applied, so they're all just blindly walking off a cliff.
this is insane to see and very illuminating about how stupid all of these PHB's are.
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"LLMs" are a red herring. Physics will always win.
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Yep, the money spent, the electricity consumed and shear amount of unreliable behaviour should be telling them to stop the insanity.
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... because human behavior is so reliable?
LLM tech/AI doesn't have to be better than all of us to be catastrophically disruptive, it just has to to be better than the bottom 25-30%.
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It don't even compare. Humans easily outperform LLMs at programming right now ... and that's touted as a stronghold of LLMs! A LLM can't do anything correctly without someone skilled at the keyboard constantly refining the prompt to what may as well be another programming language.
At best it's a weird tool that you have to fight with all the time.
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Its like they all got out of the same hypnotoad timeshare presentation
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Alternatively, they see an opportunity to fire people and renegotiate contracts with lower payment. There have already been several instances of people being fired because they were being made redundant by AI and then it turned out H1B visas were used to hire much cheaper replacements. Given that was done immediately, the bosses knew exactly what they were doing from the start.
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Lemmings.
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Well, I am not sure, but the level of collective delusion and hype-adoration (for lack of a better term) is really astounding. It is like these people have zero actual understanding of reality.
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It depends on how much the job changes. Technically the introduction of bigger computer monitors changed my job as well. Someone further up rattled off a list of jobs they said were safe from AI and yet literally every one has products or services that they use in their professional already on the market with AI powered features, or in some cases used AI long before AI was cool (machine learning based systems have existed for decades).
For a given definition of "change" he is right. Heck for a given definiti
self check out really went bad for them (Score:2)
self check out really went bad for them
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No, that was because of malicious customers.
So that +400 million bonus was absolutely justified.
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You must be kidding. I don't know about the Walmarts in your part of banjo country, but out here in southern California it's mostly self-checkout.
Observation (Score:2)
This person runs a shop not an AI company, I am not sure he understands tech that well.
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I'm not sure he understands his own shop that well. But I'll bet it understands him.
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Soviet Russia is located in Washington, DC.
Managers in general don't understand the situation (Score:2)
That is my personal observation
Bagholders needed (Score:2)
What skill does it take to parrot marketing sayings to shill for Nvidia? Just say the most over the top hyped up statements imaginable.
"Everyone else will be affected but me" (Score:3)
Consequences for thee, but not for me.
What about the Hallucination Problem? (Score:2)
When you or I use one of the AI chatboxes we see errors a significant fraction of the time. And of course this is only a small fraction of the errors because of our lack of previous knowledge.
I just don't understand why business is going to use AI so heavily with all these errors.
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It's not hallucinations (those only happen for biological organisms). These are errors in pattern prediction -- malfunctions. The malfunction rate in these things is astounding. Imagine a surgeon who gets more business every time he kills a patient because he saw "he" and assumed he was supposed to operate on the head instead of the heart. That's where LLM's are.
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It is not a malfunction. The LLM is working perfectly fine and perfectly correctly when it produces hallucinations. Hence the term "hallucination".
It is only a "malfunction" if you mistakenly believe LLMs are capable of reliably giving correct answers. They are not. The mathematics they are based on does not allow that.
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> When you or I use one of the AI chatboxes we see errors a significant fraction of the time. And of course this is only a small fraction of the errors because of our lack of previous knowledge.
> I just don't understand why business is going to use AI so heavily with all these errors.
That is simple: They will, things will fail, they will refuse to acknowledge reality and continue. Some months/years later Gartner (or somebody else "credible") will make a study titled "AI decreases productivity due to bad answers - relying on it is stupid", and then they will roll it all back. Those that survive having made these utterly idiotic decisions, that is.
Oh, and for decisions within regulatory oversight, using AI will likely be outlawed.
What we witness here is how incapable the typical CEO actua
With ICE... (Score:2)
With ICE arresting, detaining, and deporting below minimum-wage workers Walmart hires through contractors, yeah they will need AI. With drones floating around following us...like in Futurama:
[1]https://youtu.be/Jass7lf8oxQ?t... [youtu.be] (the new loss prevention...)
What will be funny is when the AI replaces the ROI cost-effective focused human CEO with a more efficient program, that doesn't get performance bonuses, works 24x7.
Think of the "BOSS" from Doctor Who "The Green Death"...or any other thriller-horror sci-fi B
[1] https://youtu.be/Jass7lf8oxQ?t=142
Made me appreciate people more, at least (Score:2)
1. I am now BEGGING to get into chats with actual humans because the AI agents suck SO HARD
2. I interviewed with a company and asked about their AI policy and the policy is: we don't use it for any of our code. The guy said that if it were up to him, he MIGHT allow it a bit, but only at the senior level and above. Otherwise, you have to do your time and learn your lessons. I respect this.
3. I'm surprised at how well people actually DO recognize AI slop and resent it.
So yeah, it's changed my opinion about jo
I guess that's the greatest expert on that matter (Score:2)
I guess that's the greatest expert on that matter we can get, for that price. Hopefully, he gets replaced by AI first.
Including yours (Score:2)
See above,
Another one bites the dust (Score:2)
It is fascinating how these CEOs all commit career suicide just for a mindless hype.
If AI takes our jobs, how do compnaies profit? (Score:2)
Companies profit from people who go to work, get a salary and buy their products. If AI takes all our jobs, how would these companies turn a profit?
Again? (Score:2)
We need to wake up again? Ai is going to change the world again? Look, enough people tried to wound us up on the topic. It worked in the beginning, but we soon experienced that Ai is not that great yet. Now let me sleep, I was dreaming about peace on earth. Maybe CEOs need to read the story of the boy who cried wolf. Maybe we should put a tax on people that preach that the world is going to change radically.
Yeah, and you'll have to hire them back for $$$ (Score:2)
I've worked with Ford, and I totally know where they want to cut IT workers to save money, but AI will totally fail them in a couple of areas. How do I know that? I worked with Ford and GM and now work with Boeing and I know where AI totally fails in the "upgrade" (really data migration) process. Yeah, teachable, still fails to understand the bad programmer lingo in the instructions (I know what "blah" means, AI would hard fail). That said, we are automating the hell out of the process, people will probably
Conversations on UBI (Score:2)
If AI really is going to be as disruptive as some people are predicting, you'd hope that governments would be having conversations about what the hell is coming. Western governments have already taken a rather head-in-sand approach to other challenges, like immigration and ageing populations, so I'm not at all optimistic that they have even considered large numbers of unemployed white collar workers and the resulting hit to the public finances
where have all the customers gone (Score:5, Insightful)
Headlines in the near future will be like, we fired all our employees, now where have all the customers gone
Will it eliminate CEO positions? (Score:1)
Seems to me that's the biggest expense in a company.
Re:Will it eliminate CEO positions? (Score:5, Funny)
Also one of the easiest to replace with a machine that hallucinates.
Re:Will it eliminate CEO positions? (Score:4, Interesting)
CEOs are almost always the highest compensated in the company but at a large company like Walmart I guarantee you that the combined cost of all the employees far exceeds that of the employees. Not having a CEO (or not paying him, whatever) wouldn't really change the financial situation of a company.
Now a company where it might actually be the case that the CEO makes way more than all the employees put together is Elon Musk and Tesla's extremely ridiculous compensation package for him. His pay package is actually a large percentage of the company's budget.
Re: where have all the customers gone (Score:2, Offtopic)
Where did all the grammar go? Why does it say "it's the largest companies" when obviously they meant company.
Re: where have all the customers gone (Score:4, Interesting)
> Where did all the grammar go? Why does it say "it's the largest companies" when obviously they meant company.
AI helpers do not understand language, but instead perform statistical word completion (in the literature, this is called "generative modelling").
The idea goes back at least to Claude Shannon's papers on communication theory from the 1950s. [1]This page has a link to his 1948 paper. [wikipedia.org] A particularly illuminating example is on p.7, Section 3.
Your example exhibits short term trigram learning. The completion of 3-word phrases is consistent, but the 4-word completion is obviously wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Communication
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> The idea goes back at least to Claude Shannon's papers on communication theory from the 1950s. This page has a link to his 1948 paper. [wikipedia.org] A particularly illuminating example is on p.7, Section 3.
Cool find
There won't be headlines (Score:1)
Billionaires are painfully aware of the dependency you just described and they hate it. They view US regular working stiffs as less human than they are. And they are not happy about their wealth and prestige being derived from us.
What they're trying to do is create a new economic system apart from capitalism where they can control goods and services entirely without needing consumers.
That's why AI is so desirable to them. It lets wealth access skill without skill accessing wealth.
Basically a new
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This is an interesting take, can you explain this to me in more detail:
"What they're trying to do is create a new economic system apart from capitalism where they can control goods and services entirely without needing consumers.
That's why AI is so desirable to them. It lets wealth access skill without skill accessing wealth."
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There's a book that might be interesting
[1]Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis [penguin.co.uk].
He has made one of the most clear statements of the idea of the destruction of capitalism by the new tech barons. In his statement it's about a change from purchases to rent seeking which gives the owners of particular tech dominions much greater power over transactions than they would have in a normal capitalist exchange.
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781529926095
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This story would be more convincing if they gave better details about what they are doing. As far as I can tell, the've dne these concrete things:
1) Built chatbots.
2) Automated some warehouse tasks (and pretended that was AI)
3) Hired people to improve the chatbots because they don't work well (a position they call "agent builder")
The other things they mention are just future guesses (they talk about it a lot at executive meetings). They also mention revenue is going up (why not advertise your company
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My thoughts exactly.
If this is the case, with effectively all workers effected negatively through job loss or job deterioration, then almost all of humanity will reject AI powered organizations and services.
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Indeed. But that idea requires connection two closely related facts by a simple chain of reasoning. The "CEO" subspecies of the human race is generally not capable of doing that. (Affects many others too.)
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Customers? We fired.them too. They kept demanding these pesky "goods and services" in exchange for cash..Our AI predicted we won't need them. Instead we do this other thing AI told us to...