IKEA’s largest franchisee, Ingka Group, used AI to separate routine customer-service work from requests that needed human judgment - and then treated those harder requests as a business opportunity. Its assistant, Billie, launched in 2021 and by 2023 handled about 47% of incoming inquiries, or 3.2 million conversations about products and recommendations. The automation saved nearly €13 million. But the remaining callers often wanted help planning rooms, a task that required understanding their homes and preferences rather than simply retrieving information. Ingka retrained roughly 8,500 call-center employees as remote interior-design consultants, teaching them room planning, digital retail sales and relationship management.
The human-led remote meeting channel generated €1.3 billion in revenue by the end of fiscal 2022, equal to 3.3% of Ingka’s sales. The company aims to raise that share to 10% by 2028; in fiscal 2025, it helped more than 73,000 customers with furniture and kitchen planning. The example argues that customer-service data can reveal unmet demand, not just opportunities to cut costs. That approach also highlights a workforce challenge: a study of large U.S. companies found that half of CFOs expect AI to create roles requiring new skills, while 47% anticipate significant headcount reductions and only 12% feel very prepared. Ingka has paired its reskilling effort with AI-literacy training for 30,000 workers, though whether its consulting channel reaches the 2028 target remains an open test.
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