Walmart CPO Donna Morris to Develop Employees' AI Skills

Donna Morris, Chief People Officer of Walmart, has said that the company is looking to develop some level of AI skills for every single one of its in-store and corporate employees. 

Speaking at the MIT Technology Review’s EM Tech AI summit, Donna said that the company had been experimenting with AI use cases in recent years to streamline work and improve the customer experience – but stressed that having a thorough upskilling strategy was crucial.  

“We need to bring people along on the journey, and we need to make sure that we’re educating people,” She told attendees. “It’s a form of literacy in many ways, and so we really want to make sure that our associates feel literate and capable of using AI.”

AI reshaping at Walmart

According to Donna, the “vast majority,” or the company’s jobs will have some form of shaping as it brings in new AI capabilities. 

To ensure employees are prepared, she advises that the team at Walmart remains “pragmatic about how much AI is truly shaping and what jobs.”

Managing this ‘shaping’ has involved the launch of an AI professional certificate through a partnership between Google and Walmart. 

This certificate is designed to focus on the most critical areas of AI skills development for specific job roles – spanning communication, research, data analysis, planning and organisation and content generation. 

Walmart employees also have access to practical, job-focused training as part of this partnership, which allows staff to experiment with AI skills in the context of their roles. 

This is being rolled out to all staff, following Walmart’s integration of AI tools across the business – including on its shop floor, where it has introduced AI led task management to reduce shift planning time.

Donna said of the partnership: “We want to make sure that we equip all of our associates with the best tools to allow them to be successful as Walmart continues to reshape as a people-led, tech-powered company. But equally so that each of our associates has the ability to navigate their own careers.”

Strengthening US competitiveness

Improving employee AI literacy is crucial, Donna says, to ensure US businesses remain competitive on an international scale. 

In conversation with Fortune, she said, “Let’s look at China. “Five-year-olds are learning DeepSeek, and that says a lot about how they believe in capability building. 

“What would it do to our US economy, if we all leaned into that opportunity?”

Initiatives are being developed across the US to do just that – such as a nationwide training programme developed by Google and the US Chamber of Commerce. 

The initiative is designed to help small business owners in the US grow revenue and be more productive through AI, by helping employees at these companies upskill in AI and encourage business owners to view the technology as an essential tool. 

“We as big employers should be actively engaged in trying to equip our respective employees – in our case associates – to be prepared for a world that is AI enabled and automated or digitised,” Donna said.

“If all of us collectively leaned into our workforces, where might we be?”