JD.com CEO pledges to save 900,000 jobs from AI, but warehouse plan suggests cuts

Liu Qiangdong, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, recently pledged in an internal speech to protect the company’s 900,000-strong workforce from the impacts of AI and robotics. A Bloomberg report on Thursday cited a video circulating on Chinese social media, where Liu vowed to “do everything possible to safeguard employment for hundreds of thousands of staff, including blue-collar workers,” even as JD.com accelerates its deployment of AI and autonomous logistics.

This promise arrives in a Chinese policy environment where it would be unwise for a major employer to say anything else. Chinese courts ruled twice in six months during 2026 that companies cannot fire workers simply because an AI can perform their jobs. The rulings held that a strategic decision to adopt AI does not constitute the kind of unforeseeable circumstance the Labour Contract Law allows as legal grounds for termination. Additionally, Beijing’s top governing bodies formalized gig-worker protections earlier this year, covering more than 200 million platform workers. Binding algorithm-transparency requirements take effect in 2027, making the political costs of a large Chinese employer being seen to fire workers due to AI structurally high.

However, Liu’s statement is in visible tension with positions he has taken publicly over the past 12 months. At the 2025 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, he argued that in the coming “unmanned era,” people might only need to work one hour a week, and he suggested governments impose a 90% tax on tech monopolies to fund the resulting social compact. He has also announced JD’s plan to open the world’s first fully unmanned delivery station in April 2026, integrating drones, autonomous vehicles, and household robots capable of placing parcels directly inside homes through authorized smart locks. Liu’s public framing has alternated between “automation will replace most jobs and that is a problem to be policy-managed” and, this week, “we will protect jobs.”

The operational record cuts more cleanly than the rhetoric. JD.com has been one of the most aggressive deployers of warehouse robotics in Chinese e-commerce. The company opened a fully automated warehouse in 2018 that handles 200,000 orders a day with just four human employees, all of whom service the robots. JD Logistics, the company’s separately listed delivery arm, runs Large Language Models for route optimization and has deployed autonomous delivery vehicles, drones, and robot couriers at scale across Chinese cities.

The 900,000 employees Liu now vows to protect are the result of structural overhang from JD’s decade as a labour-intensive operator, not a forward-looking plan for the role of human workers in the firm. The line JD is now trying to walk is the same one the entire Chinese platform-economy sector is being asked to walk. Beijing wants the productivity gains AI offers and the employment stability the Communist Party’s political legitimacy rests on. The two are not obviously compatible.

JD’s public framing this week suggests automation will cut logistics costs and unleash a “positive cycle” of higher employee pay and stronger consumer confidence. This is the version most agreeable to Beijing. Whether the cost-cutting incentives at the company level actually deliver that cycle, or simply translate into fewer human couriers and warehouse staff over time, is the operational question. The press-release framing, separate from the Bloomberg-sourced video of the internal speech, reportedly emphasizes that JD has fostered 183 different types of frontline roles, including AI trainers and robot maintenance engineers. Those new categories are real but small relative to the courier-and-warehouse base. Whether they will absorb workers displaced from the larger roles or simply create higher-skilled positions filled from outside the affected workforce is the question the next several years of JD’s labour data will answer. Neither JD.com nor Liu commented through formal channels on the Bloomberg-reported internal speech.