By Belle Lin

Walmart's global tech chief said the retail giant will continue to hire top engineering talent, even as it builds more AI agents to automate their work.

The company's focus on engineering and AI agents comes as Chief Executive Doug McMillon said last week that "AI is going to change literally every job." While some jobs and tasks at Walmart will be eliminated, McMillon said, others will be created.

Walmart is still bringing on new developers. For instance, the retailer last month created an "agent developer" position, which calls for the employee to "deploy agents that automate complex workflows."

"We continue to adjust our workforce given the new realities, but we're still working very hard to find the right talent in the market," said Sravana Karnati, Walmart's executive vice president of global technology platforms. "Good engineers are always needed."

A Walmart representative added that the company will "continue to invest in upskilling, recruiting top-tier engineers with deep expertise, and redeploying talent to areas that demand uniquely human strengths."

Walmart's focus on hiring top engineers comes amid a contraction within the wider IT jobs market. Jobs in tech have been harder to land with ongoing economic uncertainty -- causing employers to think twice about all but the most sterling of candidates, or those who have familiarity with AI. Many of Walmart's open engineering positions call for candidates with AI-related skills.

Walmart executives also said last week that the company's global workforce will stay roughly flat over the next three years, even as its mix of jobs will change significantly.

That could mean more of a focus on AI agents as Walmart sorts through how its roughly 2.1 million employees will be affected. Those agents, which are AI bots that can autonomously perform tasks on behalf of humans, have already helped boost productivity for Walmart's software engineers, Karnati said.

Walmart declined to say how much it is spending on its technology investments, and what kind of financial return it is seeing from them.

In August, the company unveiled a "super agent" for engineers called Wibey, which Karnati said helps unify the more than 200 AI agents Walmart's tens of thousands developers have built so far.

Now, using the Wibey super agent, Walmart's engineers can register their newly created agents with the system, and advertise their agent's capabilities for other employees to use, Karnati said.

One set of Walmart's AI agents are automating the process of complying with accessibility requirements, or ensuring that Walmart's apps and website are accessible for people with disabilities. That has helped Walmart's engineers automatically identify 60% of software bugs in accessibility compliance and automatically fix 95% of them -- leading to an eight times improvement in productivity in that area, according to Karnati.

AI is also helping Walmart's engineers get up to speed and modernize its legacy software code -- some of it written decades ago, and some of it written in computer mainframe language. Before using AI tools, Karnati said developers needed to seek out senior engineers for their expertise in its code base, resulting in a lot of time spent chasing down answers.

In addition to using AI agents, more than 95% of Walmart's engineers are using AI coding assistant tools like Microsoft's GitHub Copilot and JetBrains, according to Karnati.

In the future, Walmart's AI agents will become sophisticated enough to not just interact with humans, but also interact and collaborate with each other, Karnati said.

That will create new challenges for the company, including how to manage humans alongside their digital counterparts. One scenario Karnati imagined is that a human engineering manager lets AI agents work overnight to solve a problem, and returns in the morning to inspect the work of the bots.

So while Walmart's engineers are becoming more productive with AI, Karnati said that also means they are discovering more problems for more humans to solve.

"We're not at a point where we can let an agent run loose and let it solve all kinds of problems," he said. "We will still keep humans in the loop."

Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 02, 2025 13:02 ET (17:02 GMT)

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