How Walmart's investment in tech, including an AI tool to plan worker shifts, helped it take on Amazon, with 18% of its ~$680B revenue in 2024 generated online
Walmart was founded by Sam Walton, who grew up in a farming family, in 1962. …
Context & Ripple Effects
Walmart’s technology push builds on earlier store automation, including Pickup Towers and inventory-scanning robots, and its planned expansion of automated picking and packing for online grocery orders. The shift-planning tool extends that operational digitization from fulfillment equipment to labor allocation.
The reported online-revenue share makes the operational program strategically relevant: Walmart is using its store network and workforce systems to strengthen its position against Amazon, rather than treating e-commerce as a separate channel.
First-order effects
- Walmart can use AI-assisted shift planning to align store labor more closely with operational demand, changing how managers schedule associates.
- Its technology investments support an online business that accounted for 18% of 2024 revenue, reinforcing Walmart’s ability to compete with Amazon across physical and digital retail.
Second-order effects
- The combination of store operations, fulfillment automation, and workforce planning raises the execution bar for retailers competing on online convenience without abandoning physical locations.
- Walmart’s continued automation of picking and packing for online grocery orders makes labor-planning systems more consequential, because staffing and fulfillment capacity must be coordinated.
Third-order effects
- If this model continues to work, retail competition will increasingly turn on how well large chains connect stores, logistics, digital ordering, and labor data—not on e-commerce scale alone.
- The longer-term labor question is whether automation primarily changes job design and scheduling or also constrains headcount growth, an issue raised in coverage of automation-led sales growth without job creation.
The trend: Large retailers are turning AI and automation into an integrated operating system for stores, fulfillment, and digital commerce.