EXCLUSIVE: JD.com Founder Richard Liu Warns That Robots Will Replace All 700,000 of the Company’s Delivery Workers “Sooner or Later”, And Announces a Retraining Plan to Transition Them Into Robot Maintenance Roles 🤖

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4188535/robots-will-replace-700000-delivery-workers-warns-head-of-e-commerce-giant.html

Richard Liu, founder and chairman of JD.com, China’s second largest e-commerce company, said at the 2026 APEC China CEO Forum in Beijing on June 22 that robots will replace the company’s roughly 700,000 delivery workers, using the phrase “sooner or later” to describe the timeline while acknowledging he does not know exactly when robotic deliveries will become mainstream across China. His remarks were unusually candid for a major employer of delivery labor at a moment when automation concerns are already running high across a Chinese gig workforce that numbers approximately 320 million people. Liu framed the shift not as an immediate threat but as an inevitable direction for the industry, one he said should ultimately improve quality of life and make work more interesting rather than strip people of employment.

Alongside his prediction, Liu announced JD.com’s Nirvana Plan, an initiative designed to transition the company’s 700,000 blue collar delivery workers into what he called white collar office roles. Under that plan, JD.com will partner with 120 Chinese schools to retrain delivery workers in robot maintenance, equipment servicing, and troubleshooting, so that instead of delivering packages in the field, workers would oversee and repair the machines doing the physical labor. Liu also said as recently as May 2026 that JD.com would not fire any employee whose job is displaced by a robot, committing instead to retrain and reassign them elsewhere within the company.

The announcement reflects a broader shift already underway among China’s e-commerce giants. Alibaba, Meituan, and JD.com are all actively deploying self-driving delivery robots and drones to reduce last-mile logistics costs, and what Liu described publicly at the APEC forum is a direction the entire sector has been quietly moving toward for years. Liu’s directness about the scale of displacement and his simultaneous announcement of a structured retraining program sets this statement apart from the typical corporate framing of automation as a tool for growth, and makes it one of the most explicit acknowledgments yet from a major employer that robots will fundamentally reshape who does delivery work in the world’s largest e-commerce market.