JD.com founder and chairman Richard Liu has issued a stark warning about the future of the company’s workforce, stating publicly that robots will “sooner or later” replace the e-commerce giant’s 700,000 delivery workers. The statement, made at the APEC China CEO Forum in Shenzhen on June 22 and reported by The Next Web and Nikkei Asia, is one of the most candid acknowledgments by a major Chinese technology executive of the scale of labor displacement that AI-powered automation is expected to produce in the logistics sector.
JD.com operates one of China’s largest delivery networks, employing hundreds of thousands of couriers who handle the last-mile delivery of packages to consumers across the country. The company has been investing heavily in autonomous delivery technologies — including ground-based delivery robots, autonomous vehicles, and drone delivery systems — for nearly a decade, but Liu’s statement marks a significant escalation in the explicitness of the company’s automation ambitions.
The Scale of the Transition
The 700,000 figure is striking in its specificity. It represents not a vague aspiration toward automation but a concrete acknowledgment of the workforce JD.com currently employs in delivery roles and expects to eventually replace with machines. For context, 700,000 workers is larger than the entire workforce of many Fortune 500 companies, and the social and economic implications of displacing that many people in a single industry are substantial.
Liu’s framing of the transition as “sooner or later” rather than “if” reflects JD.com’s leadership’s confidence in the trajectory of autonomous delivery technology. The company has been operating delivery robots in a growing number of Chinese cities for several years, and the technology has matured to the point where it can handle a significant proportion of deliveries in controlled environments — university campuses, residential compounds, and business parks, without human intervention.
The next frontier is open-road delivery in complex urban environments, where the challenges of traffic, pedestrians, and unpredictable obstacles are significantly greater. JD.com’s autonomous vehicle program has been making steady progress on this front, and the company has been working with local governments to establish the regulatory frameworks needed to deploy autonomous delivery vehicles at scale.
The Competitive Context
JD.com’s automation push is driven not only by the long-term cost advantages of replacing human labor with machines but also by the intensifying competitive pressure from rivals, including Alibaba’s Cainiao logistics network and Meituan’s delivery platform. All of these companies are investing heavily in autonomous delivery technologies, and the race to achieve cost-competitive autonomous delivery at scale is one of the defining competitive battles in China’s e-commerce industry.
The Morgan Stanley forecast that China will deploy 50,000 humanoid robots in 2026 is relevant here: while most of those deployments will initially be in manufacturing environments, the logistics sector is widely expected to be one of the early adopters of humanoid robots for tasks that are too complex for purpose-built delivery robots but too repetitive and physically demanding to justify human labor indefinitely.
The Nirvana Retraining Program
Liu did not simply issue a warning and walk away. He paired the prediction with a concrete plan. JD.com has launched an internal program called Nirvana, designed to move its couriers into new roles before the robots arrive. The company has signed contracts with approximately 120 schools across China to retrain delivery staff in skills such as repairing and maintaining the autonomous machines set to replace them. New roles include robot maintenance engineers and AI trainers — a pivot from rain-soaked streets to indoor technical jobs servicing fleets of delivery robots.
“I don’t want our 700,000 employees to be left without jobs or income,” Liu said. The pledge creates an obvious tension with his automation forecast: if robots replace couriers, the math of 120 schools retraining 700,000 workers is daunting. Robot-maintenance roles will not exist at anything close to today’s courier headcount, and the timeline for automation remains undefined.
The Labor Displacement Question
Liu’s statement has reignited a debate about the social consequences of AI-driven automation in China. The country’s leadership has been explicit about its ambitions to become the world’s leading AI power, and the government has been supportive of the development and deployment of autonomous technologies across a wide range of industries. But the displacement of hundreds of thousands of workers in a single sector raises questions about the social safety net and retraining programs needed to manage the transition.
China’s delivery workers are not a homogeneous group. Many are migrant workers from rural areas who have built their livelihoods around the gig economy that JD.com and its competitors have created. The transition to autonomous delivery will not happen overnight — Liu himself acknowledged that it will take time — but the direction of travel is clear, and the workers who will be affected deserve more than a vague assurance that the transition will be managed responsibly.
The government’s response to this challenge will be closely watched. China has been investing heavily in vocational training and retraining programs, and the national education overhaul reshaping university curricula to emphasize AI and robotics skills is partly designed to prepare the next generation of workers for an automated economy. But the workers currently employed as delivery couriers are not recent graduates—they are adults with families and financial obligations, and the path from delivery worker to AI technician is not a straightforward one.
The Broader Significance
Liu’s statement is significant not just for what it says about JD.com’s plans but for what it reveals about the broader trajectory of AI-driven automation in China. The country’s technology leaders are increasingly willing to be explicit about the scale of the changes that automation will bring, even when those changes involve significant workforce disruption. This candor is, in some ways, a sign of confidence — confidence that the technology is mature enough to make these predictions credible and confidence that the social and political environment will accommodate the transition.
Whether that confidence is warranted remains to be seen. The displacement of 700,000 delivery workers is not an abstraction — it is a concrete human challenge that will require concrete human solutions. How JD.com, its competitors, and the Chinese government navigate that challenge will be one of the defining stories of the AI era.