Walmart will continue hiring software engineers despite deploying more than 200 AI agents to automate development work, as the retail giant reshapes its workforce for the artificial intelligence era.
The company’s global technology chief said it remains focused on recruiting top engineering talent even while building agents to handle complex workflows, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Sravana Karnati, Walmart’s executive vice president of global technology platforms, said: “Good engineers are always needed.” The retailer recently created an “agent developer” position requiring employees to deploy agents that automate complex workflows.
Chief Executive Doug McMillon said last week: “AI is going to change literally every job.” Whilst some positions and tasks will be eliminated, others will be created, he noted.
Walmart unveiled a “super agent” called Wibey in August, which helps unify the more than 200 AI agents built by tens of thousands of developers. Using Wibey, engineers can register newly created agents and advertise their capabilities for other employees to use.
The company’s AI agents are automating accessibility compliance processes, automatically identifying 60 per cent of software bugs and fixing 95 per cent of them. This has led to an eight times improvement in productivity in that area.
More than 95 per cent of Walmart’s engineers use AI coding assistant tools, including Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and JetBrains. The technology helps developers modernise legacy software code, some of which was written decades ago in mainframe languages.
Walmart executives said the company’s global workforce of approximately 2.1 million employees will remain roughly the same over the next three years, although the job mix will change significantly.
Karnati said future AI agents will become sophisticated enough to collaborate, creating new management challenges. However, he emphasised: “We’re not at a point where we can let an agent run loose and let it solve all kinds of problems. We will still keep humans in the loop.”
