Walmart Ties AI Training to Worker Confidence; Dell Urges Agent Guardrails

Walmart, the largest private employer in the world, asked associates in June how they experience AI and received more than 1.7 million responses, CNBC reported. Maren Waggoner, Walmart's chief people officer for associate experience and digital, said at the 2026 CNBC Workforce Executive Council Summit in New York City that 77% of the company's office-based associates feel confident using AI tools. Among U.S. frontline associates, 84% said they are confident using digital tools, which reflect the AI-powered tools many now use in their roles.

Walmart has partnered with Google and OpenAI over the last 13 months on free learning and AI certification programs for associates, according to CNBC. Waggoner said associates who completed OpenAI training reported a 27% gain in confidence using AI. Walmart data showed its associates report greater comfort and excitement than the broader U.S. public, CNBC reported, citing an August 2026 Pew Research Center poll in which about 52% of U.S. adults said they were more concerned than excited about AI.

Waggoner said AI is perhaps the biggest technological revolution in Walmart's 64-year history, but the company's approach to transformation has not changed. She described Walmart's mission as being a people-led, tech-powered omnichannel retailer dedicated to helping people save money. On jobs, Waggoner said Walmart is using AI to automate processes in fulfillment centers to reduce friction and let robotics assist, while focusing work on human judgment.

At Walmart's innovation lab in Dallas, automated efforts to reduce physical tasks previously performed by humans have created more quality-assurance roles rather than broader job losses, Waggoner said, according to CNBC. She also said customers “actually like talking to a human at checkout,” leaving associates to use AI to solve customer challenges. She cited a store manager in Mexico who built his own AI agent to review reports and drive fresh-produce sales. “He's using the tool, but he's still running the store,” Waggoner said. “The store manager job is still there.”

Dell's John Scimone, president and chief security officer, told theCUBE's Dave Vellante that security and resilience are central as enterprises decide which tasks to delegate to AI agents. He said organizations are designing agents that will work for years, making the design stage the best time to build in security and resilience. “Security resilience by design for agentic is a huge opportunity,” Scimone said, according to SiliconANGLE.

Scimone said business resilience once meant disaster recovery built around wildfires, hurricanes and grid outages, but a widespread cyberattack across an entire digital ecosystem is now the more likely scenario. Agents add a new dependency because work handed to software stops when the software does. “A core part of your resilience posture has to contend with the notion that if our agents go down, our work is not happening,” he said.

A survey of 25 enterprise technology and security leaders led by theCUBE Research's Krista Case found that 19 had autonomous agents in production, and none allowed those agents to perform high-risk actions without human approval, SiliconANGLE reported. Scimone said companies should be thoughtful about where they cannot fail, put deterministic guardrails in place and let the business run. He said he sees too much caution in that area.

Dell applies tight identity and access controls to every agent and keeps extensive logging and traceability of decisions and actions, Scimone said. Only four of the survey's 25 respondents had tested an AI agent incident scenario, according to SiliconANGLE. Dell has expanded its cyber resilience tools and joined OpenAI Group PBC's call for collective action on cyber defense. Scimone said attackers have used AI for years but have not yet deployed it at full scale, and he expects that to change in the coming quarters rather than the coming years.

Vellante pointed to a survey finding that organizations granting agents bounded autonomy showed stronger recovery readiness than those relying solely on human approval. Scimone said governance systems designed upfront will let companies move quickly and take more risk with confidence. “Organizations that design those governance systems upfront are going to be the ones, ironically, that can move the quickest and can take the most risk,” he said.

Editor's Summary

Walmart's first survey of 2.1 million associates found that training and experience are linked to greater confidence in AI, with 77% of office-based staff and 84% of U.S. frontline workers reporting confidence in AI or digital tools. Dell's security chief said upfront, deterministic guardrails can allow enterprises to expand AI-agent autonomy while maintaining resilience. Both accounts point to training and governance as central to broader AI adoption.