Future of Business: Walmart’s CEO on AI, Jobs, and Managing Rapid Change

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I'm Adi Ignatius and this is the HBR Ideacast. For the next several weeks, we're bringing you a view from the C-suite, interviews with leading CEOs across industries and geographies recorded during our recent future. business event. Today we're getting inside the mind of Walmart CEO Doug Macmillan, who just announced that he'll be stepping down in a couple of months as the head of the retail giant. Walmart is the world's largest company by revenue, its biggest private employer, and boasts 255 million customer visits per week.

As goes Walmart, so goes the economy. For his part, Doug started working in Walmart as an hourly associate in 1984, becoming its CEO in 2014. We spoke with him before he announced his retirement, focusing on how Walmart built its digital business to stay competitive, how it has dealt with issues of tariffs, talent, and worker pay, and the ways it has adapted its supply chain to appeal not just to shareholders, but to all of its stakeholders. Here's our conversation.

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