JD.com's Nirvana Ledger for 700,000 Blue-Collar Workers: How Feasible Is It for Couriers to Repair Robots?

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On June 21, at the 2026 APEC China Business Leaders Forum, JD Group Chairman Liu Qiangdong made a clear prediction about the future of last-mile logistics: "Someday in the future, all deliveries will be made by robots, and couriers will not be needed at all."

For JD's current 700,000 blue-collar employees, this is a clear industry signal. But at the forum, Liu Qiangdong immediately added: "I don’t want our 700,000 brothers to have no food or work."

For this reason, JD disclosed its internal "Nirvana Plan" for the first time. Liu Qiangdong revealed that JD has signed agreements with 124 schools nationwide, planning to send its 700,000 blue-collar couriers back to the classroom in batches for skills training. "Let them take responsibility for robot maintenance and upkeep, because machines will always break down, and malfunctions still require humans to service them."

As a domestic internet company with the largest proprietary logistics network, JD's move has been imbued with emotional undertones in public opinion. However, the "Nirvana Plan" also exposes the growing pains and negotiations faced by labor-intensive giants at the turning point of automation. The future restructuring of workflow is likely to be far more complicated than the linear logic of "replacing humans with machines and letting humans repair machines."

Liu Qiangdong’s vision is based on the expectation that embodied intelligence and autonomous driving technologies will become highly mature, achieving a high percentage of unmanned last-mile logistics. However, there are structural frictions that are hard to overcome when moving from the technical laboratory to real-life streets.

The first is the commercial aspect of cost.

Currently, courier wages are highly variable and fluctuate with delivery volume. If switched entirely to robot fulfillment, companies will face extremely high initial fixed asset investments and depreciation pressures. With the current hardware supply chain, the total lifecycle cost for a universal robot that can handle non-standard environments—such as old buildings without elevators and complex obstacles—is still difficult in the short-term to match skilled human labor.

The second issue is the complexity of the physical world.

Real-life last-mile delivery is filled with massive long-tail scenarios. AI performs well in closed or semi-closed environments, but in open, rule-lacking urban settings, the system’s fault tolerance is extremely low. This means that the technological evolution of automation will be gradual, not abrupt.

The core of the "Nirvana Plan" is converting manual laborers into technical maintainers. From the perspective of human resources economics, this vision faces relatively high practical barriers.

Historical industrial upgrades show that groups replaced by new technologies often find it difficult to directly become advanced technical workers within the new technological ecosystem. The primary skill model for couriers is "physical stamina + route familiarity + basic communication," while robot hardware/software maintenance and system scheduling require foundational knowledge of electromechanics or data processing. The training network of over 120 schools must reconstruct the foundational skills of 700,000 adult workers while maintaining current fulfillment efficiency—its time and education costs, as well as transformation success rate, lack industry precedents for reference.

A more rigorous analysis is that this training may be a "soft landing" mechanism. It can select a small number of employees with learning ability for technical positions, but cannot serve as a universal solution for all 700,000 blue-collar workers.

However, the logistics workflow in the next 5 to 10 years is more likely to be a highly blended "gray stage" between humans and machines.

In this phase, workflows will be reorganized: steps with high standardization, such as fixed-point trunk lines or station handovers, will be rapidly taken over by low-cost automation equipment. Human employees will mainly handle abnormal situations machines cannot process.

Meanwhile, elements requiring flexible human judgment—such as on-the-spot inspections of fresh goods, delivery of high-value items, and handling customer complaints—will remain the moat for couriers.

The "Nirvana Plan" is a defensive strategy by leading companies at the intersection of population dividend decline and the AI wave. It points out the inevitable direction of technological evolution, but also exposes the real dilemma faced by capital in dealing with the vast attached labor force while pursuing ultimate efficiency.

The logistics network of the future is bound to be smarter, but during this long transitional period, the friction between technological upgrades and workforce placement will be a long-term issue that all labor-intensive platforms must face.

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