JD.com founder Richard Liu said at the APEC China CEO Forum in Shenzhen on Sunday that robots will eventually replace all of the company’s 700,000 delivery workers. “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, according to the Financial Times. He did not specify a timeline.
The statement is unusually direct for a major technology executive on the subject of automation displacing workers, and arrives at a moment of heightened sensitivity in China’s labor market where youth unemployment ran at 16.3% in April and gig workers now number approximately 320 million – roughly 40% of urban employment.
The Nirvana Program
Liu paired the prediction with a commitment and a plan. He said he does not want the company’s 700,000 workers to lose their jobs or income, and in a separate internal speech reported by Bloomberg, pledged that JD would not fire a single front-line worker replaced by machines. To support that promise, JD.com has launched an internal retraining program called Nirvana, signing contracts with approximately 120 schools across China to retrain delivery staff in skills including robot maintenance and AI model training.
The proposed transition is from outdoor courier work – physically demanding, weather-dependent, and increasingly automated – to indoor roles servicing the robot fleets set to replace the delivery function. The sequencing bet is that retraining can outrun the pace of automation deployment.
The arithmetic is challenging. Robot maintenance roles will not exist at anything approaching 700,000 positions. Whether 120 schools can reskill a workforce of that scale into roles that require technical competency in systems most of them have no prior exposure to is the program’s central unresolved question.
JD’s Automation Infrastructure
JD.com is not an outside observer of the automation trend it is describing. The company already operates unmanned warehouses, drone delivery, self-driving delivery vans, and unmanned pickup stations across China. In Shenzhen, airport robots deliver meals to departure gates. Others ride commuter trains to restock convenience stores. The same autonomous logistics technology Liu says will eventually eliminate the courier role is already deployed and expanding within JD’s own operational network.
In May, JD.com announced the world’s first humanoid robot auction as part of its 618 shopping festival campaign, and its JoyInside robotics platform is targeting connections with more than 10 million terminal devices in 2026. The company is simultaneously building the technology and managing the workforce implications of its deployment.
The Broader Labor Context
Liu’s candor surfaces a tension that most technology executives navigate more carefully. The automation of last-mile delivery at scale would affect one of China’s largest blue-collar employment categories at a time when policymakers are already tracking AI’s impact on employment as a national priority – Beijing’s 15th Five-Year Plan includes explicit employment monitoring mechanisms tied to AI and robotics deployment.
The honest framing from Liu is that the question for JD’s 700,000 couriers is not whether the robots are coming, but whether the transition infrastructure arrives first. The Nirvana program is the company’s answer to that question. Its adequacy will be visible in JD’s own workforce data over the next several years.
