Walmart is cutting or relocating about 1,000 corporate employees this week as the US retailer restructures its technology operations and accelerates investment in faster ecommerce delivery services to compete with Amazon.

The job reductions affect Walmart’s global technology and product teams, according to an internal memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal, with many staff asked to relocate to the company’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters or offices in northern California.

Daniel Danker, head of global AI acceleration, and Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s global chief technology officer, wrote in the memo that the changes would “simplify how the work is organised” and eliminate overlap between teams.

The restructuring follows a broader review of Walmart’s technology operations after Danker joined the retailer from Instacart last year. Walmart told US media outlets the cuts were linked to organisational changes rather than artificial intelligence replacing jobs. A company spokeswoman told the Journal that the changes were related to “organisational structure and alignment, not handing over more tasks to artificial intelligence”.

Walmart, the largest private employer in the US with about 1.6 million workers, has repeatedly consolidated corporate functions in recent years while shifting staff towards major office hubs. Earlier this year the retailer filed notice of plans to eliminate about 100 roles at its Hoboken, New Jersey, office, while roughly 1,500 corporate employees were cut in a similar restructuring last year.

The workforce reductions come as Walmart expands a separate push to speed up grocery and household deliveries through a network of small “Walmart Depot” facilities, according to the Financial Times. The sites, which are closed to the public and used exclusively by drivers on Walmart’s Spark delivery app, are designed to shorten delivery times and reduce congestion inside large Walmart stores.

The Financial Times reported that Walmart has opened depots in locations including New Jersey, Arkansas and Dallas, and is exploring additional sites in New York, Florida and California. Company representatives stated in planning documents for a proposed site in Poughkeepsie, New York, that the depots are “a new way to deliver faster to more people”.

Jason Klipa, a Walmart government relations director, told a public hearing in Poughkeepsie that the smaller facilities allow drivers to “pick an order, not clog the store up and get the delivery out as quick as they can to the customer”. Angel Rodriguez, a Spark driver in New Jersey, told the Financial Times that collecting orders from the depots was significantly faster than navigating full-sized stores.

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