In my previous Editor’s Note, which kicked off our special Summer issue on the autonomous future, I focused on the vertigo-inducing pace of change in the AI era, an unprecedented acceleration that was overwhelming even the most adaptable executives in tech. There was a real sense—illuminated by the CEO survey we published—that leaders were off balance and on the ropes, struggling to keep their footing.
Three months is a long time these days. While that theme of acceleration continues this fall, the mood in the C-suite seems to be shifting. Reading the stories in this issue, I was struck by the sense of emerging confidence, even swagger, among the leaders and companies we feature.
The prime example is our cover story on Walmart and its guitar-playing CEO, John Furner, who stepped into the top job in February after spending more than 30 years at the company. Senior writer Elizabeth Segran, who has been covering Walmart and its competitors for years, reveals how Furner is rapidly deploying AI at scale—iterating on its Sparky shopping agent, encouraging employees to automate parts of their own jobs with AI tools—to transform customers’ shopping experiences and seriously challenge Amazon’s e-commerce supremacy. Segran reports from the company’s most technologically advanced distribution center, its annual corporate hypefest (known as Associates Week), and the laboratory of a Supercenter in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Walmart tests new technologies before quickly exporting them around the country and the world. “Build once, expand globally,” Furner calls the strategy.
This kind of speed comes with a cost: Furner will need to manage some very real employee anxiety over AI job displacement, as Segran learns. But the company is undeniably on a roll, and its new CEO seems determined to crank up the momentum even more.
Elsewhere in the issue, Anthropic tops our Best Workplaces for Innovators list for moving briskly to turn an internal tool into Claude Code. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are essentially a runaway train, as former Atlantic writer John Hendrickson reports in his analysis of how these markets are already distorting the democratic process.
Meta is sprinting to catch up to its peers in the AI race, as global technology editor Harry McCracken explains. And Adidas is taking the need for speed literally, scoring a win in our annual Innovation by Design Awards for creating the shoe that Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe wore while running the world’s first official sub-two-hour marathon.
That Adidas example is about a very different kind of velocity, of course. We offer it up as a welcome change of pace.