Walmart expands Academy training as AI reshapes tech roles

Walmart is leaning harder on Academy as AI changes the work inside its stores and technology teams, and the company’s bet is that training will matter as much as software itself. The retailer says its global academy now serves all 2.1 million associates worldwide, after launching in 2022 as a system meant to reach 2.3 million workers with job-specific retail, well-being and leadership training.

The scale is hard to miss. Walmart says associates logged nearly 5.5 million training hours through Academy in fiscal 2023, and that more than 3.5 million associates have already gone through the program. It is also investing $1 billion in career-driven training and education by 2026. In the United States, Walmart says 90% of roles do not require a degree, a signal that the company wants workers to see learning and advancement as something that can happen on the job, not just before hiring.

That matters most for hourly associates looking for a path up. Walmart says 75% of its U.S. salaried store, club and supply chain managers started as hourly workers, and by 2025 all store, club and supply chain managers are supposed to go through Manager Academy. The company also says it operates more than 200 Walmart Academy training facilities in the U.S., which gives the program a physical footprint beyond the online modules that now reach much of the workforce.

The tech side shows how the model is changing with the business. Walmart Global Tech supports more than 10,000 stores in 19 countries and more than five million devices used by associates every day. In a 2025 engineering blog, the company said AI is reshaping how software gets coded, tested, compiled and deployed. Its answer includes tools, classes, stretch projects, senior-talent collaboration and hundreds of GenAI-powered tools meant to speed up learning and problem-solving.

That is where Global Tech Academy and Tech Fellows Academy come in. Walmart says the sessions run monthly and use cohort-based learning to deepen technical mastery across the organization. Thousands of associates have already taken part, and the sessions are designed to do more than check a training box. The goal is to help workers understand what Walmart is building, why it matters to customers and members, and how the decisions behind AI systems, data platforms and infrastructure play out at Walmart scale.

For workers, the real measure of payoff is whether the training leads somewhere concrete: a promotion, a broader role, a move into more complex technical work, or a stronger case for the next job opening. Walmart is framing Academy as career capital, not a side benefit, and in an era when AI is changing the work itself, that may be the company’s most practical pitch.