Overview
- Richard Liu, JD.com’s founder, warned that the company’s roughly 700,000 delivery workers could eventually be replaced by automated delivery machines and said he does not want those workers left without jobs.
- JD.com has launched partnerships with about 120 schools to retrain couriers for new roles such as robot repair and maintenance as part of its preparation for wider robotics use.
- Major industry signals show rapid robot deployment: Amazon reported it has deployed more than one million robots since 2012 and Figure AI said robots now outnumber its human staff, underlining the technology’s growing commercial use.
- China’s recent five-year plan names robotics as a priority technology and state support could accelerate adoption, but JD.com and others have not given a concrete timetable for when large-scale courier displacement would occur.
- Experts and advocates warn that retraining leaves open questions about scale and quality of new jobs and stress that a large and growing gig workforce in China could face significant disruption if automation spreads quickly.