Walmart Reorganizes Technology Teams, Cutting or Relocating About 1,000 Corporate Roles

Walmart is cutting or relocating about 1,000 corporate workers as the company overhauls its technology and product teams. The layoffs and relocations were outlined in a memo sent Tuesday by Walmart executives Daniel Danker and Suresh Kumar, according to a copy viewed by the Wall Street Journal.

“In some cases, we’ve had different teams working on similar problems,” Daniel Danker and Suresh Kumar wrote in the memo.

Since joining Walmart over the summer, Danker, a former Instacart executive hired into the newly created role of head of global AI acceleration less than a year before the memo, and Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s global chief technology officer, reviewed the retailer’s internal structure and moved to consolidate overlapping teams.

Daniel Danker was hired last year to lead the company’s global AI acceleration efforts. In recent months Walmart merged several global technology platforms that had previously operated independently across different units.

Affected employees were told they could apply for other open positions inside the company, according to the memo viewed by the Wall Street Journal. , or to offices in Northern California, people familiar with the situation told the Wall Street Journal. Earlier this year Walmart disclosed plans to lay off roughly 100 employees at its Hoboken, NJ, corporate offices.

6 million workers in the US, the vast majority of them hourly store and warehouse workers. A company spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that the cuts were related to organizational structure and alignment, rather than handing work over to artificial intelligence systems. Walmart confirmed the memo reported by the Journal but declined further comment to The Post.

The restructuring arrives after the company has spent years expanding its technology footprint while seeking to protect profit margins. Executives have increasingly emphasized automation, AI and higher-margin businesses such as advertising as critical growth drivers.

The company has also sought to squeeze costs out of its sprawling operations while integrating technology across divisions including Walmart stores, Sam’s Club and its international business.

The retailer has been on a prolonged sales-growth streak, boosted in part by higher-income shoppers flocking to its stores during years of stubborn inflation. But Walmart has simultaneously faced mounting pressure to modernize its systems and compete more aggressively with Amazon in logistics, advertising and digital commerce.

The company has rapidly expanded automated fulfillment centers, online delivery capabilities and AI-powered tools designed to improve inventory management and customer service.

Executives have repeatedly pitched those investments as necessary to sustain long-term growth while limiting labor and operational costs. The company has not publicly disclosed which departments were most heavily affected in Tuesday’s restructuring.