Walmart’s U.S. operations employ roughly 1.6 million people today. And if Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner’s instincts are right, that number will hold steady in the coming years, despite all the talk of how the growing use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) might decimate jobs across the economy.
“When we look out two years, three years, five years, where I think we’ll be is we’ll have roughly the same number of people we have today,” Furner told Fortune’s Jason Del Rey at the Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah on Tuesday. But, he added, Walmart will have a larger business, meaning that employees on payroll at the largest U.S. employer will be on a per capita basis more productive than now.
Last year, Walmart U.S.’s revenue rose 4.7% to $462.42 billion as it took share from ri