Walmart sells so many groceries it’s nearly impossible to keep track, but it’s about to get easier: The retailer plans to use tens of millions of sensors to track pallets of groceries shipped across its vast network of stores.

Greg Cathey, the retailer’s senior vice president of innovation, said in a joint announcement with sensor startup Wiliot on Thursday that the two are “tackling one of the hardest problems in retail — knowing exactly what we own and where it is at any given moment.” If only you knew that every time you left your grocery list at home.

Sensor of Self

There was a time when Walmart employees had to manually scan and check the vast flows of food products that travel through the distribution network of America’s largest grocer. (You may remember this as your high school summer job.) Tasks across the supply chain are now being rapidly automated, and Chief Executive Doug McMillon told a workforce conference last week that “AI is going to change literally every job.” Wiliot’s Pixel censors, which are the size of postage stamps and power themselves by harvesting radio waves, are about to initiate some of that change.

The sensors utilize Bluetooth technology, and since 2023, Walmart has been using them at select locations to transmit the location, condition and temperature of pallets. Currently used at 500 locations, they’ll be deployed nationally to roughly 4,600 Walmart locations and 40 distribution centers by the end of next year, creating a state-of-the-art supply chain data feed for Walmart’s AI systems. Walmart has moved aggressively to deploy AI across its operations, as efficiencies help keep costs down and preserve its value-retailer reputation. The company has an AI shopping agent in its commercial app for customers, an AI agent for suppliers and an AI agent for its employees to help manage workflow. It’s also developing AI agents to automate the work of its engineers, even while pledging to hire more tech talent. Most important of all, these advances have coincided with growth:

• Revenue has increased by $150 billion in the last half-decade, even as Walmart’s employee numbers have remained mostly flat. The Arkansas-based company’s shares are up 12.5% in 2025, and its market value is more than $810 billion.
• Executives forecast revenue will keep growing as AI-driven automation makes operations more efficient, but expect Walmart’s headcount to stay flat for at least another five years (which, at the very least, tracks with the Yale Budget Lab’s recent finding that AI has yet to significantly disrupt broader employment). The company employs 2.1 million people, and its 1.6 million US staffers represent the largest private workforce in the country.

White Collar Blues: McMillan told the Associated Press last month that shifts from AI have led to tasks and jobs changing and that he hopes “the net ends up being even more people” working there. He went on to say that AI could have a more immediate impact on white collar workers, while its on-the-ground workforce may prove more resilient: “All the other ones are working in a store, a club, a distribution center. And I think those jobs change more gradually.”

For Tesla, the end of EV tax credits hurts so good.

Sales for the EV titan surged in the third quarter, the company reported on Thursday, as consumers rushed to buy new cars ahead of the September 30 expiration of the $7,500 federal government EV tax credit. It’s a welcome win for a company that can’t seem to stop hitting the skids.

Tax Credit Where It’s Due

In fact, the EV credit expiration sparked a record sales quarter, with the company delivering 497,099 vehicles worldwide from July through September. That’s a 7.4% year-over-year jump, and a stark rebound from two straight quarters of declining year-over-year sales to start the year; Tesla sold just 336,681 cars in Q1 and 384,122 cars in Q2, both representing 13% drops from the previous year.

The reasons for the downturn were myriad and obvious: rising competition, a product line that had grown tired, broad economic unease amid a new global trade war and Musk’s political misadventures. It’s not just consumers who have grown frustrated with the company and its mercurial leader:

• Tesla, in addition to other enterprises in Musk’s empire, has been beset in recent months by high-profile employee departures — happily or otherwise, according to a recent Financial Times report, which said many employees had grown frustrated with Musk’s brash style of politics and Tesla’s pivot from EVs and toward robotics and AI.
• At Tesla, the brain drain has included veteran deputies such as longtime sales and operations head Omead Afshar, as well as leaders within units dedicated to developing batteries, superchargers, public policy, the Model Y and the ultimately doomed and forever unnamed low-cost Tesla model.

The Half-Trillion Dollar Man: That makes the third-quarter sales a balm for Musk’s Tesla headache, though he’s still dealing with a few others. On Thursday, Musk lost his bid to transfer an SEC lawsuit regarding his Twitter stake from a Washington, DC, court to one in Texas, where many of his companies are based. Just a day earlier, however, Musk became the first person in the world to reach a $500 billion net worth, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaire Tracker. Yeah, we think he’ll be able to cover the travel expenses to get to DC.

Prepare your ears for more AI Drake beats, because the music industry is embracing the uncanny valley that is AI-generated tunes.

Universal Music and Warner Music are nearing AI licensing deals, according to a report by the Financial Times. The labels are reportedly in talks with AI startups including ElevenLabs, Stability AI, Suno, Udio, and Klay Vision, as well as Spotify and Google.

The deals would allow tunes from the labels’ massive libraries (Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Ariana Grande and many more) to be fed into the AI companies’ large language learning models, influencing the music the generators create. Universal and Warner are reportedly pushing startups to develop an attribution system that can track when an artist’s music is used, prompting a micropayment each time a song using that music is played.

It may not be so simple.

The Era of AI Music is Already Here

Spotify said it wiped 75 million AI-generated tracks from its platform last year, while French streamer Deezer said last fall that nearly a third of all its track uploads were created using AI. The music industry doesn’t want to miss out on that moolah:

• The big three music labels — Universal, Warner and Sony — sued AI startups Suno and Udio last year, alleging the industry newcomers violated the labels’ copyrights “en masse.” Universal’s and Warner’s upcoming deals would reportedly include settlements for these ongoing suits, paying back the labels for past music use. Sony said it’s in talks with companies that have “ethically trained models.”
• AI startup Eleven Music has already signed licensing deals with Merlin and Kobalt, companies that handle music rights for artists such as Phoebe Bridgers and Adele. The Kobalt deal splits royalties 50/50 with the AI generator.

The Next Napster: Labels may have a hard time becoming besties with AI overnight, with executives telling the Financial Times that deals between the two will be trickier than in streaming, a.k.a. the last major tech advance that upended the music industry. AI models are trained on tens of millions of music files, and it’s not always clear exactly which sources generators draw from when they create something new. Deals in other creative industries have involved one-time lump sums: For instance, HarperCollins charges $5,000 per book used to train AI.