Walmart

Walmart Inc. is a US retailer whose first store opened in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas; it opened its Home Office and first distribution center in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1971, and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972.¹ Today it operates more than 10,900 stores and clubs in 19 countries plus e-commerce sites, and at the end of fiscal 2026 employed approximately 2.1 million associates worldwide, about 1.6 million of them in the United States.² Its Sam’s Club warehouse chain, which had nearly 600 stores in the US in 2020, is part of the company.⁷⁶

Walmart appears on MetaRoles for what it has put in stores and in associates’ hands. In October 2018 it described the Auto-C autonomous floor cleaner, then in 78 stores and rolling out to around 360 more, as freeing an associate who would otherwise ride a scrubber for about two hours a day to tidy restrooms or serve customers, while noting that the machine “needs adult supervision”: an associate has to prep the area and map its route.³ Sam’s Club said in October 2020 that it would add 372 Brain Corp-powered Tennant T7AMR scrubbers to give every club in its US chain a robotic scrubber.⁶ In the other direction, in November 2020 Walmart ended its five-year relationship with Bossa Nova Robotics, whose shelf-scanning robots had been in about 500 stores, saying it had learned “a lot about how technology can assist associates”.⁴

More recently the AI is software for staff. In June 2025 Walmart said its conversational assistant for associates had more than 900,000 weekly users and over 3 million queries a day, announced a real-time translation feature in 44 languages, and said team leads and store managers estimate that an AI task-management tool, initially for overnight stocking, cut the time team leads spend planning shifts from 90 minutes to 30. All of these are Walmart’s own figures and estimates.⁵ Our posts grade the cases individually, and treat Walmart’s upgrade for answering returns questions as a vendor claim until its launch is confirmed.