Can John Furner lead Walmart through its AI era?

As Walmart CEO Doug McMillon prepares to depart, he leaves Walmart in a good spot, especially when it comes to AI and the way the big-box retailer is thinking about it.

During Walmart’s latest earnings call, McMillon said Walmart is using AI to build an e-commerce experience that is more personal, “more conversational,” and “multimodal,” meaning voice, text, image, video. “Interacting with our app will include improved imagery, short-form video, live streaming, and interaction with influencers,” McMillon said.

However, Walmart’s AI era will be led by incoming CEO John Furner, who previously ran the company’s North America operations—ground zero for its AI experiments. Furner’s track record suggests he understands both the technology and its business implications, but can he scale it across the entire organization with speed and ambition?

Experts told Retail Brew they see Furner as a retail-first leader inheriting a well-oiled machine, whose challenge will be recrafting Walmart into an agentic omnichannel retailer in the same way McMillon had to define digital shopping.

In response to an emailed query from Retail Brew, Walmart pointed to McMillon’s memo sent to the staff on Nov. 14. “John represents the next generation of Walmart leadership—a leader deeply grounded in the company’s purpose and values, with the vision and experience to guide our people through a new retail era fueled by innovation and AI,” McMillon wrote.

“[Furner’s] consistent message has been AI-driven retail transformation,” Rick Watson, e-commerce strategy consultant and founder and CEO of RMW Commerce, told Retail Brew.

Working together: Walmart recently announced a partnership with OpenAI to let customers shop directly within ChatGPT. While Walmart’s ChatGPT integration starts with the checkout process, McMillon said during the earnings call that it will become “more immersive, integrated, and seamlessly connected.”

“I view [Furner] as not a technology-for-technology’s-sake person,” Watson said. “If you contrast him with other leaders like Sundar [Pichai] at Google or Sam Altman [at OpenAI]...he definitely has a retailer’s, operator’s mindset, and he believes that technology isn’t an end to itself; It’s a means to help employees serve customers and to help make the customer experience better.”

According to Ryan Craver, chief strategy and data officer at Podean, Furner is taking over Walmart at a time when the business is in a very good position.

“Their largest market is what has continued to lead the ship,” Craver said. “So provided they keep doing what they’re doing, I think John Furner is inheriting a well-oiled machine.”

Zoom out: On a high level, Walmart has followed Amazon’s playbook in the digital realm, from building out a marketplace, an ads business, and rolling out a Prime-like subscription service called Walmart Plus.

In the eyes of Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, Furner’s challenge is going to be inventing what an agentic omnichannel retailer actually looks like over the next 10 years, “in the same way that Doug had to invent what a digital omnichannel retailer looked like.”

“John is taking over in an era where agentic has the real potential to fundamentally change how people shop again,” Goldberg added, “how they discover new products, how they make purchase decisions, where they buy them, and even who, in terms of microchips and robots buying products instead of humans in many cases.”

On the earnings call, Furner himself said he sees AI agents as game-changing: “Having a digital agent that is there working for you, we think, is going to be really powerful.” Behind the scenes, agentic AI helps maintain Walmart’s catalog accuracy and gaps in product assortment to better serve customers.

Furner also said he is excited about some of the new capabilities coming over the next few months as Walmart’s AI-enabled digital shopping assistant Sparky can take more action on behalf of customers.

“I see John Furner somewhere in between [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella on one side, meaning he’s not going to change what Walmart is all about, but he does have to reinvent parts of it. And on the other hand, I see him with the operational mind of someone like [CEO] Tim Cook at Apple,” Watson said. “Somewhere in between those two executives sits John Furner.”