It’s perhaps the defining career question of our time: Will artificial intelligence make people’s jobs better, or will it eliminate their jobs entirely?
No pressure, right?
In the “sorry, many of you will be unemployed soon” camp, we have some fairly prominent voices:
- Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic told Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, potentially pushing U.S. unemployment to between 10 and 20 percent.
- Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, in February: “We have displaced people from AI — and we offer them other jobs.” He added at Davos that JPMorgan will likely employ fewer people five years from now.
- Ford CEO Jim Farley was the most direct of all, telling the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer: “Artificial intelligence is gonna replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
So it’s worth paying attention when the CEO of the largest private employer in America — Walmart, with 2.1 million associates worldwide — keeps saying something a bit different.
Walmart CEO John Furner has been taking a different position for months:
At the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference last September, for example, when asked about AI’s impact on Walmart’s headcount, made this prediction:
“When we look out two years, three years, five years, where I think we’ll be is we’ll have roughly the same number of people we have today …
We’re extending people’s careers, and those jobs pay better.”
The shareholder letter
And, Furner’s first shareholder letter, released last week alongside Walmart’s annual report, opens on the same note:
