What IKEA Got Right That Everyone Else Is Getting Wrong
Every week I read another sensationalist headline about a company using AI to cut jobs. A tech giant reducing headcount. A bank “streamlining” its customer service team. A law firm quietly letting go of junior staff because the chatbot can now draft the boring stuff. And every time, I think the same thing: even if this was close to real, and not designed to keep us scared and under control, there is no AI strategy in sight! These fear-mongering headlines are nothing more than a cost-cutting exercise with an AI logo slapped on the front to take the blame.
Then there is a piece about IKEA that crossed my desk today and honestly, this is the story I wish more CEOs would read properly before the next board meeting.
What Actually Happened
Back in 2021, IKEA’s parent company Ingka Group launched an AI chatbot called Billie, named after the iconic Billy bookcase. Billie was designed to handle the routine stuff: order status, delivery windows, store hours, return policies. The bread and butter of any call centre. By the end of 2023, Billie had resolved roughly 47% of all customer enquiries, handling about 3.2 million interactions and saving the company around €13 million in the process. More recent reporting in 2026 puts that figure closer to 57%, so the trajectory has only gone one way.
Most companies, faced with that result, would do the obvious thing. Spreadsheets come out. Finance calculates the headcount saving. The press release talks about “efficiency gains” and “operational optimisation”. And somewhere in the middle of all that, thousands of people quietly lose their jobs.
IKEA did something different. They looked at the 53% of enquiries Billie couldn’t resolve, and they got curious about what was in there. What they found was a pattern: customers were asking for help with home planning and interior design. Real, consultative conversations that no chatbot on earth could replicate. Questions like “how do I make my small flat feel warm” or “what would work in this awkward corner” or “I’ve got this budget, what should I prioritise”.
So IKEA made a decision that, on paper, looks almost radical in 2026: they retrained 8,500 call centre workers as remote interior design consultants. Paid video and phone consultations, real humans doing real consultative work, priced at £25 for a 45 to 60 minute session in the UK, scaling up to £125 for a full workspace design package.
The result? In the 2022 financial year alone, that remote interior design channel generated €1.3 billion in revenue, roughly $1.4 billion, accounting for 3.3% of Ingka Group’s total sales. Their stated aim is to grow that channel to 10% of total revenue by 2028.
Sources: Ingka Group Newsroom, Reuters coverage via CX Today (June 2023)
Why This Matters More Than People Realise
Here is the bit I want everyone to sit with. IKEA did not generate €1.3 billion by deploying a smarter chatbot. They generated €1.3 billion by being curious about what the chatbot couldn’t do.
That is the whole story, right there. The AI wasn’t the hero. The analysis was.
Most companies treat chatbot deflection rates as the finish line. You hit 40%, 50%, 60%, whatever the number is, and that becomes the success metric. A cost saving. A line on the P&L. The project is done, everyone goes home.
But the deflection rate isn’t the answer. It is a map. The unresolved queries are telling you where your customers actually want to talk to a human. That is not a failure of the AI. That is a market signal that most companies are completely deaf to.
And here is the thing that really gets me. Call centre staff are not interchangeable cogs. They are the people who have heard every customer complaint, every awkward question, every “can you help me figure out what I actually need” conversation. They know the product. They know the customer. They know where the frustrations are. If you had to design the perfect workforce for a consultative design service, you would start with people who already know how to listen, explain, and build rapport on the phone. IKEA already had 8,500 of them, and in doing what they have done, they still have all 8,500 of them to back up the AI if and when it is needed.
The Leadership Lesson Nobody Wants to Write Down
I spend a lot of time at Techosaurus saying AI is a leadership challenge, not a technology problem. This is exactly what I mean.
The technology part of IKEA’s story is genuinely unremarkable. A decent chatbot, some natural language processing, a smart handover to human agents. You could build most of it today with off-the-shelf tools. What makes the IKEA story work is not the technology. It is the decision-making sitting on top of it.
Someone at Ingka Group had to ask the right question. Not “how much can we save?” but “what is this data telling us about what our customers actually want?” Someone had to commission the analysis of the unresolved queries. Someone had to go to the board and argue for reskilling instead of layoffs. Someone had to believe that their people could become something more than they were, given the right training and the right runway. And then someone had to actually fund that.
None of that is a technology decision, none of it sits with IT, all of it is leadership.
The companies saying they are using AI to cut staff are, mostly, not using AI badly. They are using leadership badly. The AI is just the excuse. And I say that as someone who works with businesses on AI every day. The tools are ready. The models are capable. The real bottleneck, in almost every organisation I walk into, is the person at the top who doesn’t know what question to ask.
What This Looks Like for Smaller Businesses
I know what some readers will be thinking. “Great for IKEA. They have 8,500 staff and unlimited training budgets. What does any of this have to do with my twelve-person SME?”
Actually, quite a lot. The IKEA model scales down far better than the headlines suggest.
Think about any small business you know. There is almost certainly a cost centre in it. A task that eats time, generates no revenue, and frustrates the person doing it. Answering the same questions on email. Booking appointments. Chasing up outstanding invoices. Putting together the same three quotes a week. All of that is Billie territory. All of that can be automated, cheaply, with tools that already exist.
The IKEA question is: what does the person freed up from that work do instead? And if your honest answer is “we don’t need them any more”, then you haven’t thought about it hard enough. Because the unresolved queries in your business, the ones that land in your inbox every week, are telling you something about what your customers actually want more of. The thing they ask about and nobody has time to answer properly. The service you’ve thought about offering but can’t find the hours for. The follow-up calls you know would convert if someone had the space to make them.
That is your €1.3 billion opportunity, scaled to your business. It might only be £50,000. But it is almost certainly there.
Curiosity, Again
I end up saying this in nearly every piece I write, but it matters: the future belongs to the curious.
IKEA’s competitors almost certainly have similar chatbot technology. Many of them have better budgets. Some of them have more data. What IKEA had was the curiosity to read the whole story, not just the headline metric. To ask what the 53% was telling them. To see the workforce as a resource to be invested in rather than a line to be cut.
Every business owner, every leader, every manager with a budget for AI tools right now has the same choice in front of them. You can use AI to shrink your business. Or you can use AI to free up the capacity to grow it. The tools don’t care which one you pick. But your customers, your staff, and your long-term P&L absolutely do.
IKEA read the map. Most companies are still staring at the dashboard and congratulating themselves on a number that doesn’t matter. The ones paying attention to stories like this one are the ones who will still be here in ten years.
Scott Quilter | Co-Founder & Chief AI & Innovation Officer, Techosaurus LTD