Good morning. This week will bring big changes to the largest company in the world, Walmart Inc. Feb. 1 will mark the retirement of Doug McMillon after a remarkable tenure and Day 1 for his replacement, John Furner. But the company is also enacting other changes to its C-suite that make one thing quite clear: Walmart, a 64-year-old retailer, now sees itself as a tech company.
Incoming Walmart U.S. CEO David Guggina, who is succeeding Furner atop the $500 billion domestic business, has no experience running stores and has never held a merchandising role, at Walmart or elsewhere. Such an appointment would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, before Walmart, under McMillon, decided to be a tech-forward company and not let Amazon run away with the prize.
But Guggina brings to his new role at Walmart another kind of experience that Walmart has been prioritizing for years: e-commerce, automation, and supply chain expertise gained at Walmart, and before that at Amazon. In announcing his promotion, Walmart touted Guggina’s work, among other things, in building delivery capabilities to serve 95% of U.S. households in under three hours.
Another area where Guggina has appealed to the Walmart brass: adoption of AI. “AI is changing how people shop, and customer expectations are higher than ever. But no one is more prepared to usher in the next era of retail,” Guggina wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.
