Walmart Cutting, Moving 1,000 Corporate Jobs

Walmart Inc. (Bentonville, AR) is cutting or relocating about 1000 corporate jobs to help simplify its operating structure, report a variety of news sources, beginning with The Wall Street Journal. The moves reflect the retailer’s ongoing evolution from having separately organized Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club and international units into ⁠a single, shared platform. That’s according to a memo from Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s head of ‌global technology, and Daniel Danker, head of global AI acceleration, that was distributed to employees May 12.

The changes are related to organizational structure and alignment, not handing over more tasks to artificial intelligence (as is the case at many large employers), a spokeswoman for the company told the Journal. “In some cases, we’ve had different teams working on similar problems,” Kumar and Danker said in their memo.

Some of the affected staff – mainly from the company’s the global-technology and product teams – have been ⁠asked to relocate to Walmart’s Bentonville or ⁠Northern California corporate offices, the Journal reports. Affected staff can also apply for open roles within the company. (Specific numbers on cuts versus relocations were not immediately available.)

Walmart employs about 2.1 million ‌people worldwide, and its 1.6 million U.S. workers make it the country’s largest private employer.