As companies race to adopt artificial intelligence, much of the conversation has centered on job cuts, automation, and doing more with fewer workers. IKEA, whose US headquarters sits in Conshohocken, is testing a different model, writes Alberto Bellé for CIO.
Its parent company, Ingka Group, is using AI to find new work for people rather than less work overall.
What Billie Was Built to Do
In 2021, Ingka launched an AI assistant called Billie, named after the company’s familiar Billy bookcase. Its meant to handle the routine questions that make up most call center traffic, things like order status, delivery windows, product availability and return policies.
By 2023, Billie had resolved about 47% of the 3.2 million customer inquiries it received, producing roughly $15 million in operational savings.
That’s a real number, but a modest one against a company of Ingka’s size, and on its own it’s the kind of efficiency stat that usually ends a story rather than starts one.
The Other 53% Told a Different Story
What made the difference was what Ingka did with the inquiries Billie couldn’t resolve. Looking at that remaining volume, a pattern emerged: a large share of customers weren’t asking simple availability questions.
They wanted to know how a sofa would look in their living room, how to lay out a small bedroom, or which pieces would work together in a space. They wnated the kind of advice that depends on judgment and conversation rather than a database lookup.
Rather than using Billie’s gains to shrink the call center workforce, Ingka built a new service line around that demand.
Reskilling at Scale
Around 8,500 call center employees have been retrained for remote interior design consultations, digital retail sales, and relationship-driven customer service. This work draws on the product knowledge and customer rapport they’d already built over years on the phones.
The remote design and sales channel generated $1.5 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2022. That’s about 3.3% of Ingka’s total sales, putting it on a meaningful trajectory alongside the company’s online sales business, which brought in roughly $11.5 billion that same year.
Ingka has set a goal of growing the remote channel to 10% of revenue by 2028.
The reskilling effort doesn’t stop with that group. Ingka has also rolled out a broader AI literacy program aimed at 30,000 employees, with more than 4,000 trained in fiscal year 2024 alone.
A Strategy, Not Just a Story
It’s worth being clear about what this is and isn’t. The chatbot savings and the rise of the design and sales channel weren’t a clean cause-and-effect sequence.
Both developed over roughly the same multi-year stretch as part of a broader push at Ingka. And the company has made other workforce changes elsewhere, so this isn’t a blanket no-layoffs policy.
What it does show is that the choice between automating a function and cutting the people who used to do it isn’t automatic.
Ingka used Billie to absorb the repetitive share of its workload. It then spent several years building out a role for the employees on the other side of that shift. This turned what could have been a straightforward cost story into one of its faster-growing business lines.
Read more about Ingka and IKEA’s strategy with artificial intelligence in CIO.
