JD.com's Liu Qiangdong: Robots Will Replace Delivery Workers

At the 2026 APEC China CEO Forum, JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong made a prediction that would unsettle many of his company's workforce: 'In the future, deliveries will be made by robots. There will be no need for delivery workers.' According to TechNode, he paired that statement with an announcement of the company's internal 'Nirvana Plan,' an initiative aimed at helping JD.com's 700,000 delivery workers and frontline employees adapt to that shift.

The plan's mechanism involves partnering with 120 schools across China to train workers in robot maintenance and equipment servicing, skills that become relevant as automated systems need upkeep. Liu's stated motivation was welfare alongside the automation prediction: 'I don't want our 700,000 employees to be left without jobs or income.'

The tension in this framing is hard to ignore. Predicting that delivery workers will have no place in the future while pledging to protect those same workers is not a contradiction in Liu's telling; it is a sequencing argument that assumes retraining at scale can outrun the pace of automation. Whether 120 school partnerships can absorb and reskill a workforce of 700,000 is a question the reporting does not address. Robot maintenance roles are also unlikely to exist at anywhere near the scale of current delivery headcount, and the reporting gives no enrollment figures or timelines that would let you judge whether this plan is proportionate to the problem it describes.

What this announcement signals, regardless of how the Nirvana Plan develops, is that a major logistics operator is publicly stating the direction of travel. For companies across logistics and supply chain, the more interesting signal is not the automation prediction itself but that a company at JD.com's scale is now publicly committing to a workforce transition structure, however untested.