The 8,500 IKEA workers who became design advisers instead of redundancies
Global (Ingka Group; program 2021-2023)
When its chatbot Billie took over routine questions, IKEA's parent company retrained an entire call center function rather than cut it, an honestly scoped look at what that actually took.
The story
The person and the place
This is a program-level story, not a single-person one. No individual worker has been named in the public record, so it's told at the scale it actually happened: 8,500 co-workers across Ingka Group, the retail company behind IKEA, between 2021 and 2023.
The problem
Call center staff spent their days answering the same routine questions on repeat, work that wears people down without using what they actually know how to do.
The moment they didn't wait
When Billie, IKEA's chatbot, began resolving roughly half of those routine inquiries, Ingka didn't shrink the team. It retrained the group into remote interior design advisers, running design consultations and video calls, the complex problem-solving a chatbot can't do. Ulrika Biesèrt, the company's People and Culture Manager, described the intent directly: "We're committed to strengthening co-workers' employability in Ingka or elsewhere through lifelong learning and development and reskilling, and to accelerate the creation of new jobs."
Between 2021 and 2023, Billie handled 3.2 million interactions and resolved about 47% of them, a reported €13 million in savings. The remote design and selling channel the retrained workers now power generated €1.3 billion in FY22, by the company's own figures, with a stated goal of 10% of total revenue by 2028. These are Ingka's own numbers, from one specific three-year program, not an audit of the company's employment record overall. Ingka has cut roles elsewhere since, in unrelated corporate functions, so this is the story of what happened to one group of workers, not a claim that AI has never cost a job at IKEA.
"We're committed to strengthening co-workers' employability in Ingka or elsewhere through lifelong learning and development and reskilling, and to accelerate the creation of new jobs."
Verified sources
Sources
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