Walmart's crisis command center runs nonstop in Bentonville
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Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders addresses Walmart's GSOC team. Photo: Worth Sparkman/Axios
The eyes and ears of Walmart's global operations are in a Bentonville basement.
The big picture: The company's Global Security Operations Center (GSOC), located on its new campus, is the nucleus designed to track crises, traffic, weather events, news alerts and other issues that could impact its business worldwide.
- GSOC's focus is to protect employees, help support the communities where they work and keep Walmart operations functioning.
Driving the news: Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders toured the center Thursday, ahead of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — an event that reshaped Walmart's approach to disaster relief and preparedness.
State of play: The 24/7 hub resembles a movie war room, with operators monitoring weather, geopolitical events and every U.S. Walmart truck on the road. Staffers from supply chain, human resources, security and other teams act as liaisons to response units.
- "Bringing all of our partners together from across different areas of the company allows us to have a single source of truth," Jason Jackson, vice president of the GSOC, said in June.
The intrigue: The center also works to be proactive in identifying potential risks as early as possible.
Case in point: Jackson described an incident in North Carolina where the team saw a burst of 911 calls and was able to determine they were coming from a Walmart parking lot.
- Surveying the lot with remote security cameras, people in Bentonville were able to notify the store manager that there was a car on fire.
In June, Jackson also described how an active shooter had been reported in a Walmart distribution center via social media. The report was false and the GSOC was able to help keep local authorities and media informed and potentially mitigate panic.
What's next: An artificial intelligence app was recently launched within GSOC to help operators summarize each incident as they're working through the issue.
- "It's automatically updating those summaries for us, so we don't have to always have a human doing the administrative aspects … we're really excited about that," Jackson said.