Walmart CEO Doug McMillon on Leading with Purpose in Turbulent Times

**Adi Ignatius** (0:00)
Walmart is the world's largest company, its biggest private employer and its most successful retailer, with 255 million customer visits per week. Doug McMillon started his career there in 1984 as an hourly associate, and 30 years later became its CEO. Under his leadership, the company has become a digital as well as brick and mortar powerhouse. It has increased pay and benefits for its workers, its leverage technology to improve the customer experience, and work to create a more environment friendly supply chain. Doug, thank you very much for joining us.

**Doug McMillon** (0:31)
Hey, Adi, great to see you.

**Adi Ignatius** (0:33)
It is always great to have you here. Thank you for making the time. So let's just jump right in. It's never easy running a big company with AI poised to disrupt, with recurring ways of geopolitical uncertainty. What does it take to lead consistently in an environment like this?

**Doug McMillon** (0:50)
I think remembering who you are is important, but also being open to change. And when I think about what AI presents, the first thing that goes through my mind is the growth opportunity. I think right after Generative AI captured everyone's attention, we were pretty balanced in terms of our mindset between offense and defense. And I think that shifted over time to being offensive in our orientation and growth-oriented. We'll talk, I'm sure, at some point about agentic AI, but there's a great opportunity for us to change how people shop and be able to save them even more time, things like that. So we're excited about the opportunity that AI presents. And as it relates to geopolitical issues and things like that, there's been turbulence now for quite a few years. And I think we've just learned how to operate in that environment.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:38)
Well, let's talk about AI. I mean, how do you think about it? I mean, one is tempted to think, all right, so AI offers these tremendous efficiencies, possibly at the expense of human employment. I mean, how do you, what is the core kind of AI thinking at Walmart at this point?

**Doug McMillon** (1:54)
Well, again, growth is the first thing that I think of, and the e-commerce experience hasn't changed that much since it really started back in the 90s with a search bar and a laundry list. And now we have an opportunity to create an e-commerce experience that's multimedia, more personalized, contextual, really change the digital side of the equation, and we're really focused on that. As it relates to changes to employment, I really do think that every job we've got is going to change in some way. You know, whether it's getting the shopping carts off the parking lot, or it's the way our technologists work, or certainly the way leadership roles change. I can imagine how AI will change every one of those jobs, and it will create new jobs. We're starting to see some of that. All of those new jobs we've seen already are AI-oriented in some way. It will eliminate some tasks and eliminate some roles. And what we want to do is equip everybody to be able to make the most of the new tools that are available, learn, adapt, add value, drive growth, and still be a really large employer years from now. That's the goal that we're working towards. So we've done things like give everybody a Chad GPT license and give everyone other tools so that they can learn and grow and go through this process with us as a company.

**Adi Ignatius** (3:16)
Yeah. So you're heading a company that, from its founding has always been very purpose-driven, the founding family, and you've articulated that as well, since you've taken over CEO. That must evolve though, right? I mean, has the core purpose or maybe the auxiliary purposes, kind of shifted over time and since you've become CEO?

**Doug McMillon** (3:41)
When Sam Walton accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom shortly before he passed away back in 1992, he articulated a purpose for the company as far as I know, the first time that he had articulated it. And it was basically, we'll show people what it's like around the world to save money and have a better life, to live a better lifestyle. And so those words have become save money, live better. We wake up every day trying to create value for all of our customers and members, but that live better part of the equation, to your point, has changed over time. If you look at what happened in the mid 2000s with the work we did, led by Lee Scott, to become a more sustainable company, is just one example of how the mandate broadened. These days, we obviously think about not only saving people money, but saving people time, strengthening communities, strengthening the planet, playing a role in health care. I think the part that has changed is a more specific view of what live better means and how we can work as associates to improve lives.