The numbers are historic: Amazon posted $716.9 billion in revenue for 2025, nudging past Walmart’s $713.2 billion, positioning itself to debut at No. 1 on the Fortune 500 list when it hits the stands in June, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal. Walmart had held that top spot for 13 of the past 15 years.
Amazon and Walmart are now the two largest companies in the United States by revenue, and they are navigating the age of AI in ways that could not look more different. One is cutting headcount and telling employees that the workforce will shrink. The other is investing in skills, certifications and manager training while insisting that its future is “people-led, tech-powered.”
Both approaches are producing results. That reality should give HR leaders permission to stop looking for a single right answer and start asking what is right for their organization.
Amazon: leaner by design
The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon’s path to the top of the revenue rankings was built on a multi-engine model spanning e-commerce, logistics, Amazon Web Services and a fast-growing advertising business. AWS alone generated $128.7 billion in revenue in 2025, rising 20% year over year, making it the source of more than half of the company’s operating profit, the Journal noted.
That growth has come alongside significant workforce reductions. Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate workers in fall 2025, a move CEO Andy Jassy framed not as financially driven but as cultural, according to HR Executive coverage of the announcement. Months later, the company confirmed 16,000 additional layoffs at AWS, news that reached employees first via an accidentally sent calendar invitation. Together, the reductions put Amazon on track to cut roughly 10% of its corporate workforce.
Amazon’s key AI investments
Jassy has not obscured what is coming. He told employees that the company expects to need fewer people doing some jobs in the future, and more people doing other types of jobs, as AI becomes more integrated, as HR Executive previously reported. In a separate earnings call, he said Amazon’s planned capital expenditures of $200 billion for 2026 would go “predominantly” to AWS infrastructure such as data centers, chips and networking equipment to support AI, per the Journal.
The workforce message drew pointed criticism in HR circles. Jason Walker, CEO of consulting firm Thrive HR, publicly questioned Amazon’s decision to frame the layoffs around cultural misfit, asking whether doing so constituted an admission that HR had made 14,000 bad hires, and, if so, what that said about the company’s talent acquisition processes, HR Executive reported.
Walmart: people-led, tech-powered
Walmart’s path upward looks different from the inside. The Journal reported that Walmart’s fastest-growing profit engines are now tech-enabled businesses like digital advertising, membership and a U.S. e-commerce operation that grew 27% in the fourth quarter and exceeded $150 billion for the full year for the first time.
On its earnings call, Walmart U.S. CEO David Guggina said that “agentic AI is increasingly embedded across Walmart,” citing improvements in associate productivity and operations. CFO John David Rainey said the company is approaching AI development through partnerships with outside technology providers, rather than building proprietary systems, the Journal reported.
That posture reflects a deliberate philosophy at the people level, articulated most clearly by Donna Morris, Walmart’s executive vice president and chief people officer and HR Executive‘s 2025 HR Executive of the Year.
Morris said Walmart’s AI integration work has been anchored to the company’s broader leadership goal of building an organization that is people-led and tech-powered. This is a “deliberate” choice, she said, that has informed every AI decision the HR function has made.
“I would encourage my peers to engage with their leadership teams in terms of what role they want technology to play as part of their business as they go forward,” Morris told HR Executive. “If you don’t know what you’re building toward, you’re never going to get there.”
Walmart’s key AI investments
Walmart has backed that philosophy with concrete investment. HR Executive reported that Walmart announced it is among the first participants in OpenAI’s Certificates program, meaning associates will have access to free OpenAI certification in 2026.
The company has also scaled AI-powered tools for store associates, launched a generative AI assistant for employee experimentation, and, by year’s end 2025, required all U.S. store, club and supply chain managers to complete Manager Academy. This week-long, in-person leadership training prioritizes empathy and relationship-building as essential skills for a tech-powered organization, according to HR Executive.
Morris has also championed skills-based hiring at a scale few employers can match. Walmart employs 2.1 million people globally, making it the largest private employer in the United States.
HR: Pick your influence
Neither company’s approach is risk-free, and HR Executive‘s coverage of the broader AI workforce conversation offers a useful reality check for organizations watching from the sidelines.
Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder has said that most layoffs attributed to AI are in fact financially driven. He added that often technology is being used as a justification rather than a genuine replacement, because in most cases, the AI systems required to do those jobs simply do not exist yet, HR Executive reported. Forrester found that 55% of employers that conducted AI-attributed layoffs reported regretting them, and predicted that half of those positions would be quietly rehired, often offshore and at lower salaries.
The contrast between Amazon and Walmart does not resolve into a clean lesson, which is precisely the point. Both companies are growing, investing heavily in AI and signaling to Wall Street that they belong in conversations about platform and cloud-era leaders, not just retailers. These orgs are arriving at their workforce decisions from fundamentally different starting assumptions about what people are worth in an AI-integrated organization.
Morris previously told HR Executive that HR has to be a core part of framing the strategy and the role people will play, and these teams have to do that work before any AI integration project begins.
“There needs to be a tight partnership” between HR and technology functions, she said, “where you’re looking at, what role will people play, what role will technology play and what is the business really trying to achieve?”
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