JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong vowed in an internal company speech on Wednesday to protect the e-commerce group’s approximately 900,000-strong workforce from displacement by AI and robotics, according to Bloomberg, which cited a video of the speech circulating on Chinese social media. Liu said the company would “do everything possible to safeguard employment for hundreds of thousands of staff, including blue-collar workers,” characterizing the commitment as an active leadership priority rather than a passive posture. The pledge came amid acute sensitivity in China over AI’s impact on employment: Chinese courts have ruled at least twice in the first half of 2026 that companies may not dismiss workers solely on the grounds that artificial intelligence can perform the same tasks, and Beijing earlier this year formalized gig-worker protections covering more than 200 million platform workers, with binding algorithm-transparency requirements set to take effect in 2027. As one of China’s largest employers by headcount, JD.com faces structurally elevated political costs if it is perceived as using automation to shed labor.
The vow nonetheless sits in visible tension with Liu’s own recent statements and JD.com’s strategic direction. At the 2025 World Internet Conference, Liu argued that the approaching “unmanned era” might reduce necessary human work to one hour a week and called for a 90% tax on tech monopolies to fund the resulting social compact. JD.com has meanwhile aggressively deployed autonomous warehousing, last-mile delivery robots, and AI customer service systems, and has invested in multiple embodied intelligence and robotics startups over the past year. The Next Web noted that Liu’s speech reads less as a strategic reversal than as a politically calibrated signal to workers, regulators, and policymakers — one that major employers in China now have strong incentives to send, regardless of their automation roadmap.