JD.com to replace 700,000 couriers with robots

The founder of JD.com, one of China’s largest e-commerce companies, has made a rare and blunt admission: robots will eventually replace the company’s 700,000 delivery workers. While most tech executives hedge when asked about automation’s impact on jobs, Richard Liu stated it plainly at the APEC China CEO Forum in Shenzhen on Sunday.

“In the future, when robots are delivering parcels, sooner or later, there will be a day when couriers are basically no longer needed,” Liu said, as reported by the Financial Times. He immediately tempered the forecast, adding, “But I really do not want our 700,000 brothers to go without meals, without jobs.” He did not specify a timeline for when robot deliveries would become widespread.

Liu paired this warning with a plan called the Nirvana Plan. JD.com has launched an internal program to transition couriers into new roles before the robots arrive. The company has signed contracts with about 120 schools across China to retrain delivery staff in skills like repairing and maintaining the machines that will replace them. New roles include robot maintenance engineers and AI trainers, offering a shift from rain-soaked streets to indoor jobs servicing fleets of delivery robots.

“I don’t want our 700,000 employees to be left without jobs or income,” Liu said. Weeks earlier, in an internal speech reported by Bloomberg, he went further, pledging that JD would not fire a single front-line worker replaced by machines.

The two messages sit in obvious tension. Liu forecasts that couriers will vanish while vowing to protect the ones he already employs. His answer comes down to sequencing. He is betting that retraining can outrun the pace of automation.

Whether 120 schools can reskill a workforce of 700,000 remains the open question. Robot-maintenance roles will not exist at anything close to today’s courier headcount. JD’s own labor data over the next few years will be the real test.

JD is not watching automation from the sidelines. The company already runs one of China’s most automated logistics operations. It tests unmanned warehouses, drone delivery, self-driving vans, and unmanned pickup stations. Pilots are live across the country. In Shenzhen, airport robots ferry meals to departure gates. Others ride commuter trains to restock convenience stores. The automation powering JD’s network is the same technology Liu says will hollow out its biggest job category.

The comments land in a tense market. Policymakers worry that China’s rush to deploy robots threatens its most vulnerable workers. Beijing has started to track AI’s impact on jobs as a national priority. The numbers explain the nerves. China will count around 320 million gig workers this year, up from 200 million five years ago, according to the China New Employment Forms Research Center. That is roughly 40 percent of all urban employment. Meanwhile, youth unemployment ran at 16.3 percent in April. A wave of courier layoffs would hit an already strained jobs market hard.

Liu’s candor stands out against a noisy global debate. Western tech leaders have flip-flopped on whether AI will take jobs, often softening the message as politics turn. The machines, however, keep improving. Researchers are giving robots longer memories. Players from autonomous-vehicle firms to carmakers buying up robotics labs are racing to put them to work.

For JD’s 700,000 couriers, the question is no longer whether the robots are coming. It is whether the retraining arrives first.