“Innovation happens at the speed of trust, and trust forms at the individual level, and then it's extended to the team level. It's hard to trust people and to know people if you've only seen them as a box on the screen.”
Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Jeff Berman asked how Walmart balances AI-driven convenience with human connection. Furner talks about store managers and pharmacists, then explains why Walmart is an in-person, in-the-office business. The line is his case against remote-first decision-making.
Transcript
…I think we're all learning. It's hard to say where the world will be in a year or two, but we're trying to position our teams and our business in a way that wherever the world is going, back to what I said before, we can get to where the customer wants to go and we can meet them in their community.
…We know what happens when we engage online or we don't engage at all. How do you think about balancing the opportunity and responsibility to create the best possible shopping experience and the range of options for customers with Walmart is such a powerful gathering place for so many Americans?
It's a great question. Earlier, I heard you say something about big institutions or do you trust big or not? What I hear so many times in the markets all over the world, when you talk to customers, regardless what they think of big institutions or even us, what they typically come back to, regardless of their opinion, is I really like my local store manager. I like my pharmacists. In many cases, the healthcare professional that customers see most in their lifetime will be their pharmacist and they feel a sense of personal connection. A lot of people decide to go into physical shopping locations of all ages, by the way. It's interesting. I'm finding my daughters in college and their friends, they enjoy physical shopping, but there are times when they just want you to do that, take care of things for them. So the flexibility matters. But the connection does matter. And with our associate group, we bring managers in three weeks a month and we want them to know the company. But more importantly, we want…
terms of the customer experience, I mean, do you actively think about Walmart as a third place after home and decreasingly, but still work as one in two and creating an even warmer in-person experience for your customers? Is that part of how you balance this out?
We do. And it is a balance. Obviously, we're trying to provide people more tools so that they can be more productive. I remember when I started, some of the things that we would consider very basic took weeks to learn. And obviously, we want to try to put them in a position where they can get to…
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