Sam’s Club’s AI strategy says that any tool it adopts has to result in more human conversation on the floor, not less. That’s the framework Claire MacIntyre, the retailer’s chief people officer, laid out on stage with PBS NewsHour co-anchor Amna Nawaz at Semafor‘s World of Work event, and it shapes how the company is deploying AI across store operations and workforce development.
“We’re people-led, tech-powered,” MacIntyre said. “That’s who we are as an enterprise. That’s what we start from, and it’s how we lead every single conversation on this.”
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Redeploying employees
An example is Sam’s Club Scan and Go tech, the app feature that lets members scan and pay for items on their phones and walk through an exit gate without a manual receipt check. Nawaz pressed MacIntyre on the worry that if a task disappears, does the headcount disappear with it?
“What we have is more people in other areas of the club,” MacIntyre said. The associate who once stood at the exit checking receipts item by item now stands there to thank members and ask if they found everything, while others are freed up to help members on the floor. “So that if you need some help and assistance, there are more people there.”
Sam’s Club has applied similar logic to a store-standards tool associates use on handheld devices. Associates photograph displays, such as a bakery case, and the tool flags whether products meet company standards. MacIntyre said the value is in the “human-to-human exchange” conversation it triggers between an associate and a manager about the work, not in the automated check.
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Building skills without judgment
Sam’s Club has also built an AI-powered interview coach for associates coming through Live Better You, the company’s tuition-free degree program for frontline workers. The tool conducts mock interviews and gives feedback on structure, pacing and delivery. MacIntyre pointed to the tool’s neutrality over a human, who inevitably forms an opinion of the answers.
“This coach is assessing. There’s zero judgment,” she said. “Nobody sees it. Nobody’s giving you a grade on it. But you get the rich, rich feedback in a safe environment that you can then take on to do the next thing.”
Sam’s Club has taken a similar approach to manager behavior, rolling out prompts on leadership devices that flag when a new hire is approaching a turnover risk point and suggest a specific conversation to have. MacIntyre said one club manager initially resisted the prompts before coming to rely on them. “When you rolled this out, I hated it,” the manager told her, before adding that the tool is now something he in fact needed but hadn’t been getting on his own.
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