JD.com founder Richard Liu says robots will eventually take over the work now done by the Chinese e-commerce giant's 700,000 delivery workers, according to the Financial Times.
Liu said the shift will happen "sooner or later," per the FT. Rather than simply cutting those jobs, he said the company would help retrain affected workers in robot maintenance — moving people from making deliveries to keeping the machines that replace them running.
The scale is striking. As the Canadian HR Reporter notes, Liu's comments suggest robots could replace all 700,000 of the company's delivery staff, one of the largest such workforces in the world.
The remarks land against a broader anxiety in China. The Financial Times reports that the country's rapid adoption of technology threatens millions of gig-economy jobs, a prospect that policymakers fear. Delivery work has been a major source of employment, and automation on this scale would reshape who does that work and how.
Liu did not, in these reports, give a timeline for when robots would fully take over, beyond saying the change would come eventually.
Why it matters: A pledge to retrain hundreds of thousands of workers, rather than just let them go, offers one possible model for how large employers might handle automation — but it also signals how seriously a major company now expects robots to replace human labor at massive scale.