Richard Liu Qiangdong, founder and chief executive of JD.com, said robots will eventually replace the company’s roughly 700,000 delivery workers, underscoring how quickly automation is reshaping China’s labor market. The warning marks a sharp shift after he tried to calm employees in a late-May internal speech, when he promised that JD.com would not dismiss any frontline worker replaced by machines and would do everything possible to protect livelihoods.
JD.com is trying to manage the transition through a broad retraining effort called Project Nirvana. Under the program, hundreds of thousands of couriers are being sent to training at about 120 educational institutions, while dozens of training centers are being set up across China. The aim is to turn delivery workers into technicians who can maintain the robotic systems taking over their jobs.
The company is also investing heavily in automation. JD Logistics plans to buy about 3 million robots and 1 million autonomous vehicles as part of what it calls a strategy of “embodied intelligence,” combining artificial intelligence with physical machines. JD has already introduced advanced delivery robots and humanoid robots, and is hiring workers to collect training data in environments ranging from private homes to agriculture and elder care.
The issue has become a major policy concern in China, especially in labor-intensive sectors such as delivery and logistics. A new five-year government plan stresses “innovative human-machine collaboration,” reflecting Beijing’s effort to balance technological leadership with employment stability. Liu said as far back as 2018 that logistics would one day be run by AI and robots, but he now says the technology has caught up with that vision.
