The biggest companies say the same thing about artificial intelligence. Should you follow in their footsteps?
The biggest companies say the same thing about artificial intelligence. Should you follow in their footsteps?
By Bill Murphy Jr. | Published: 2025-11-02 09:55:00 | Source: Inc.com
Why do I often write about the nation’s largest companies for Inc.com, the leading voice of small business owners and entrepreneurs? There is an easy answer:
In short, I think we can often learn a lot from them.
Airlines, quick-service restaurants, and big-box retailers all have advantages in trying to identify and beat trends.
Sometimes these companies are not as nimble as small businesses, but they have the resources, brainpower, and data.
Sometimes these companies are not as nimble as small businesses, but they have the resources, brainpower, and data.
In some ways, they have advantages that the rest of us can only dream of.
So I often think: watch what they do, and seriously consider following in their footsteps.
All about artificial intelligence
The big trends now revolve around artificial intelligence. Big companies are making some very specific moves.
Amazon and Walmart — the country’s two largest private sector companies — have spent years adding workers by the hundreds of thousands.
Amazon boasted in 2021 that its workforce had grown to more than 1.6 million people, describing itself as “the largest job creator in the United States.” Walmart said last year that plans for 150 new stores would create jobs across the country.
That was then.
Amazon, Walmart, Google…
Amazon announced this week that it would eliminate 14,000 jobs at the company. Meanwhile, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon warned at a company event in September that AI was poised to “change literally every job,” and that all employees would have to adapt.
Walmart expects to keep its workforce of 2.1 million people steady over the next three years as it uses artificial intelligence to develop employee roles, according to the Washington mail.
Other examples:
- Google Inc’s YouTube offered US workers voluntary buyouts this week, saying it was restructuring around artificial intelligence.
- JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs said they plan to slow hiring as they integrate technology.
- I missed this, however mail Nestlé says it plans to cut jobs over the next two years as automation increases.
David Smith, a professor of economics at Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business, told The New York Times mail:
“Sometimes companies are looking for leaders, and when they see something going with them, they use it as a signal. As more companies move into the AI space, it will put more pressure on others to do so.”
But he added: “I see economic conditions as creating pressures to cut costs,” describing the AI explanation as a “mixed narrative.”
AI tools have proven popular with businesses and consumers for tasks like summarizing documents or drafting emails, but they are now becoming more complex mail “Conclusive evidence of large-scale increases in efficiency or productivity has not yet emerged,” he points out.
Keep watching
Of course, I am not advocating blindly following big companies.
Amazon, Walmart, and Google operate in a different world than most small companies, facing different pressures, different shareholders, and different timelines.
They can make major strategic mistakes.
If you want to take a fun tour down corporate memory, go back and look at how poorly some of the largest companies of their era managed the rise of the Internet, thus opening the door for Amazon to become what it is today.
However, I think this is the latest reminder to pay attention to what AI is doing across industries – and more importantly, how your biggest competitors think they are preparing for and benefiting from it.
This doesn’t mean you need to lay people off or freeze hiring. This means you have to think seriously about what AI can do for your business, where it makes sense to experiment, and how it can change the skills your team needs.
Watch what they do. Then decide if you should follow in their footsteps.
The opinions expressed by Inc.com columnists here are their own, not those of Inc.com.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
