The 8,500 IKEA workers who got bigger jobs instead of redundancy notices
Global (Ingka Group; program 2021-2023)
Published July 12, 2026
When its chatbot Billie took over routine questions, IKEA's parent company retrained an entire call center function rather than cut it.
The story
The person and the place
8,500 call-center workers across Ingka Group, the retail company behind IKEA, between 2021 and 2023. Brandon Mikula was one of them. So was Richard Richardson, who works at a remote-sales center in Sheffield, England.
The problem the call-center workers cared about
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 agency moment
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, set out the intent in Ingka's own announcement of the program.
What changed
From 2021 to 2023, Billie resolved roughly 47% of the customer enquiries it received, about 3.2 million of them, for nearly €13 million in reported savings. The workers went two ways. Some moved onto a resolutions team, handling the tangled cases Billie cannot close. Others became remote design advisers, running consultations over video. Three years on, Fortune went to a remote-sales centre and found them still doing it. Richard Richardson, at the Sheffield centre, told Fortune the AI is great at the by-the-book terms and conditions, but cannot yet work out what the customer has already been offered, or what else might resolve the problem. These are Ingka's own numbers, from one specific three-year program, not an audit of the company's employment record overall. This is the story of what happened to one group of workers, not a claim that AI has never cost a job at IKEA.
The move worth copying
Reskilling instead of layoffs was a choice Ingka made, and three years on, people from that group are still doing the work it trained them for. If your workplace is having that argument right now, this is the version worth pointing at. Know a company that made the same call? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"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." — Ulrika Biesèrt, People and Culture Manager, Ingka Group newsroom
Verified sources
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Sources last verified August 7, 2026.