JD.com founder Richard Liu told the APEC China CEO Forum that robots will eventually replace all 700,000 of the e-commerce giant's delivery workers, an unusually blunt prediction paired with a sweeping promise to retrain rather than fire the staff machines displace.
'Sooner or later, couriers are basically no longer needed'
"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, declining to offer a timeline. The candor stands out at a sensitive moment for China's labor market, where youth unemployment ran at 16.3 percent in April and gig workers number roughly 320 million — about 40 percent of urban employment.
The Nirvana retraining program
Liu coupled the forecast with a pledge that JD would not fire a single front-line worker replaced by automation. To back it, the company launched an internal program called Nirvana, signing agreements with about 120 schools across China to retrain couriers for indoor roles such as robot maintenance and AI-model training. The arithmetic is daunting: robot-servicing jobs will not exist at anything close to 700,000 positions, and reskilling a workforce of that size into technical roles is the program's central unresolved question.
JD is already automating its own network
JD.com is no bystander to the trend it describes. It already runs unmanned warehouses, drone delivery, self-driving delivery vans and unmanned pickup stations nationwide; in Shenzhen, airport robots deliver meals to departure gates. Its JoyInside robotics platform is targeting connections with more than 10 million terminal devices in 2026, and in May the company staged the world's first humanoid-robot auction during its 618 shopping festival. The same autonomous logistics technology Liu says will eliminate the courier role is already deployed and expanding inside JD's operations.
A national policy backdrop
Liu's framing surfaces a tension most executives navigate more carefully. Beijing's 15th Five-Year Plan includes explicit employment-monitoring mechanisms tied to AI and robotics deployment, and analysts have sharply raised their outlook for Chinese automation. The honest question for JD's couriers is not whether the robots are coming, but whether the transition infrastructure arrives first.
The move lands amid a broader Chinese robotics surge, from Morgan Stanley's raised humanoid-shipment forecast to warehouse automation advances such as Kawasaki's logistics robots and consolidation deals like Bear Robotics' acquisition of Kinisi.
Reporting based on coverage from RobotsBeat, the Financial Times and Bloomberg.