JD.com Founder Admits Robots Will Replace Delivery Workers — Even as He Vows to Protect Their Jobs

EBM NEWSDESK ANALYSIS- Katie Winearls

Richard Liu says deliveries will eventually need no human couriers at all. Weeks earlier, he pledged JD.com would not fire a single one. Both statements are true — and the gap between them is where automation policy in China is actually being written.

Two Statements, One Founder

JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong has delivered two messages in close succession that sit in genuine tension with each other. At the 2026 APEC China CEO Forum, Liu stated plainly: “In the future, deliveries will be made by robots. There will be no need for delivery workers.” Weeks earlier, in an internal speech reported by Bloomberg, he had pledged the opposite outcome for his people: “JD.com will not fire a single front-line worker replaced by machines.”

Both statements come from the same man, running the same company, describing the same underlying technology shift. Neither is dishonest. Together, they describe the actual shape of the problem facing labour-intensive employers as automation accelerates: the technology is coming regardless, and the only real variable is what happens to the people currently doing the job it replaces.

The Numbers at Stake

JD.com’s scale makes this more than an abstract corporate statement. The company’s workforce across the JD ecosystem exceeded 900,000 as of 31 March 2026, with roughly 700,000 of those specifically in delivery and frontline logistics roles. JD has built one of China’s most automation-heavy logistics operations, already experimenting with unmanned warehouses, drone delivery, self-driving vehicles and unmanned delivery stations. This is not a company speculating about automation from the sidelines. It is one of the most aggressive automation investors in Chinese e-commerce, candidly stating that its own technology roadmap points toward eliminating the largest category of jobs it currently provides.

The Nirvana Plan

Rather than presenting this purely as a threat, JD.com has launched what it calls the Nirvana Plan, an initiative explicitly designed to manage the transition for the 700,000 delivery workers most exposed to displacement. Liu has been direct about the intent: “I don’t want our 700,000 employees to be left without jobs or income.” Under the plan, JD has partnered with 120 schools across China to provide technical training, with workers being trained in skills such as robot maintenance and servicing, with the explicit goal of letting displaced couriers move into new roles as automation expands rather than simply being made redundant. Separate reporting has put the figure at more than 80 training bases established specifically for this purpose, with JD also citing 183 distinct new frontline role types it has created, including AI trainers and robot maintenance engineers.

The honest unresolved question, as one analysis bluntly put it, is whether these new categories — real but currently small relative to the scale of the courier workforce they would need to absorb — can genuinely soak up workers displaced from delivery roles, or whether they simply create a smaller number of higher-skilled positions that end up filled from outside the displaced workforce entirely. JD’s own labour data over the coming several years will be the actual test of which outcome materialises.

Why Liu Cannot Simply Say “No Comment”

The specific way the trade-off is being publicly managed only makes sense against the backdrop of Chinese labour law and political priorities. Chinese courts have ruled twice within six months in 2026 that companies cannot terminate workers, or cut their pay, simply because an AI system is capable of performing their job — holding that a strategic decision to adopt automation is not the kind of unforeseeable circumstance that legally justifies termination under the Labour Contract Law. That is an unusually direct legal guardrail against AI-driven job losses, one few other major economies have yet established in comparable form.

That legal backdrop sits alongside a broader political tension. China’s policymakers have pushed an aggressive, state-directed AI rollout across the economy, while simultaneously stressing the need for labour market stability as the country manages a slowing economy and elevated youth unemployment. A major private employer the scale of JD.com publicly committing to protect workers from automation displacement is, in that context, not simply a brand statement. It is a calculated alignment with state priorities, made by a company that is at the same time unable to credibly deny that automation is its actual long-term operating strategy.

The Real Tension at the Centre of This

Liu’s position is, on close inspection, entirely coherent rather than contradictory — but it requires holding two separate timeframes in mind simultaneously. In the long run, he believes robots will handle deliveries and the courier role will cease to exist in its current form. In the near term, covering the current workforce now employed in that role, he has committed JD.com to active retraining and redeployment rather than redundancy.

What that framing conveniently avoids stating explicitly is the natural endpoint of both commitments held together: if deliveries genuinely require no human couriers in the future, and JD.com is simultaneously committed to not firing the people currently doing that job, the company is implicitly committing to redeploying its entire current delivery workforce into other roles over time — a transition of a scale and speed that has, to date, no clear historical precedent in any major economy. The training bases and the Nirvana Plan are the visible mechanism for attempting that transition. Whether 120 schools and 183 new role categories are remotely sufficient in scale to absorb 700,000 displaced workers is the question JD.com’s own future labour data will eventually have to answer, whether the company chooses to address it directly or not.

The Wider Signal for Global Employers

For businesses across Europe and beyond watching the pace of logistics automation, JD.com’s public handling of this tension offers a useful template, regardless of one’s view on its eventual sufficiency. Acknowledging the genuine direction of the technology, while pairing that acknowledgment with a concrete, named retraining commitment rather than vague reassurance, is a materially different communications strategy than either denying automation’s trajectory or staying silent on what happens to the workforce it displaces. Whether JD.com’s specific mechanism proves adequate at the scale required remains genuinely uncertain. That it chose to name the tension explicitly, rather than avoid it, is itself a notable departure from how most major employers have so far chosen to discuss automation publicly.

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