Artificial Intelligence in Practice

8JD.com: Automating Retail With Artificial Intelligence

JD.com is one of the largest online retailers in China and a company that prides itself on high tech and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled processes, which include a drone delivery system, autonomous delivery vehicles and robot-automated fulfilment centers.

We talked to a lot of businesses when putting this book together and although they all have different ideas about the future of AI, there is one thing most of them are at pains to agree on: AI isn't here to threaten human jobs and make us redundant, but to augment our own abilities.

JD.com's founder Liu Qiangdong (also known as Richard Liu) is the exception. In a World Retail Congress 2018 interview he said: “I hope my company would be a 100% automation company. I hope that someday there will be no human beings any more. 100% operated by the AI and the robots.”¹

You might suspect he is simply being more honest than most tech CEOs, who in reality would love to be able to do away with soft, squishy and demanding humans entirely (in their businesses, at least).

However, it gives a telling insight into JD.com's strategy for rolling out AI, which has focused on using robotics to physically automate as much of its retail operations as possible.

What Does JD.com Use Artificial Intelligence For?

JD.com's big push into AI has focused on deploying it to handle delivery, logistics and supply chain tasks across its vast retail network.

In fact, at its flagship Shanghai fulfilment ...