Inside Ikea’s big bet on humans in the age of AI

Ikea has retrained roughly 8,500 call center employees to handle complex customer queries or work as sales-oriented design consultants after deploying its AI-powered customer service bot Billie in 2021, which now handles 74% of routine inquiries. The Swedish furniture giant is betting that human interaction can be a revenue driver in the age of AI, countering the standard industry approach of cutting costs and workers through automation.

The countertop was a problem far too unruly for AI to solve. When the customer called in to Ikea’s remote-sales center in Helsingborg to order a custom-cut slab for his kitchen counter, the dimensions he shared revealed it to be a lopsided hexagonal monster—no two sides the same length—with an electric stove in the middle. Could the Swedish home furnishings brand produce a countertop in such an irregular shape? Melanie Lindell, the senior sales representative who had answered the call in Swedish , ran the request up the chain, calling on Madeleine Barr, a senior sales specialist, who has been designing kitchens at Ikea for more than a decade. “It’s a lot of angles,” Barr said, as she worked to puzzle it out. Soon Barr was back with good news: Ikea could make the dimensions work if the counter’s overhang was extended just a bit. Lindell smiled, evidently relishing the chance to guide the customer toward a solution—and a potential sale—that might otherwise have fallen through. Lindell and her colleagues are at the center of a daring bet at Ikea https://fortune.com/2026/02/14/how-ikea-is-preserving-culture-adopting-ai/ : that in an era defined by automation, human interaction can be a revenue driver, not a cost to be stripped away. As the company has used AI to absorb routine customer service work, it has also retrained roughly 8,500 call center employees to handle more complex customer queries or work as sales-oriented design consultants. Design advisors like Lindell use judgment, human chemistry, and friendly reassurance to turn calls that a bot can’t handle into conversations that have proved remarkably successful at driving sales. Ikea’s 83-year-old business model is based on affordability—its founder Ingvar Kamprad was so frugal he reportedly reused tea bags—and it has maintained its low prices, in part, by stripping labor out of its system. Customers retrieve their own items from Ikea’s warehouses and typically assemble their Malm bed frames, Lack tables, and Hemnes dressers themselves. But despite its already lean operations, Ikea didn’t join the AI-era rush to impose more austerity. When so many companies are measuring success in AI adoption by how many expenses they can cut and how many workers they can let go, Ikea is treating the technology as a way to free up human workers for higher-margin work that boosts its bottom line. The Swedish furniture giant is quietly running a counterprogram to the standard AI story: Yes, it’s deploying automation to replace workers, but it’s also using the technology to make human skills more valuable. And it’s providing one answer to the pressing question of what employers should do with workers whose roles are at risk from AI. Some 92 million jobs could be displaced because of AI, related technologies, and demographic shifts by 2030, the World Economic Forum estimates. Five years ago, a worker in Lindell’s position—seated in a cubicle in an office park 65 kilometers north of Malmö, Sweden, a zip-up in Ikea’s trademark yellow draped over her chair—would likely have been fielding much more basic calls from shoppers. Among the most common: “What time does Ikea open?” and “Can I bring my dog into the store?” That changed in 2021 when Ikea introduced its AI-powered customer service bot Billie, named after the retailer’s ubiquitous particleboard-and-laminate Billy bookcase, a staple of many a starter apartment. The bot could handle those repetitive questions with ease, and in its first two years it could assist 47% of customers who used the tool; now that figure is 74%. Automating aspects of customer service is not unique to Ikea, but what happened next surely was: Instead of laying off the call center workers whose jobs the bot had partly taken over, Ikea retrained them to handle more complicated customer queries or to work as interior design sales advisors who help customers plan room redesigns and buy home furnishings. The two teams—resolutions and sales—operate from 24 remote-sales centers that cover all 31 countries where Ingka https://fortune.com/company/ingka-group/ Group, the owner of most Ikea stores, has a presence. The centers have been Ikea’s fastest-growing sales channel over the past three years, with year-on-year growth of between 15% and 20% annually. Last fiscal year, they accounted for 1.25 billion euros $1.37 billion in sales, up from 1.08 billion euros $1.17 billion the year prior. Meanwhile, Ikea says its in-house customer happiness score is now 89%, up from 60% prior to Billie’s rollout. Ikea’s efforts to distinguish itself come at a crucial moment, as its flat-pack dominance is under pressure from Wayfair https://fortune.com/company/wayfair/ , Amazon https://fortune.com/company/amazon-com/ , and design-forward challengers like Article. Ikea has responded to the pressure with an aggressive push on affordability https://fortune.com/europe/2025/04/30/ikea-furniture-frugality-creativity-inflation-ingka-ingvar-kamprad/ . The chain’s biggest retail and franchising arms reported drops in revenue for fiscal 2025, even as customer visits and units sold edged higher. The bottom line: Every sale counts. Those arms, Ingka Group which owns and operates most Ikea stores worldwide and Inter Ikea Group which owns and franchises the Ikea brand globally , both laid off hundreds of corporate workers this spring to streamline operations and keep prices low. None of the layoffs affected the remote-sales centers, nor were any attributed to AI. But the fact that these two companies that govern Ikea are private gives it the luxury of experimenting with price and people strategies that might spark shareholder blowback at a listed company. Perhaps that’s why it remains one of the few examples of a company that has successfully reskilled employees whose jobs have been automated—one of the biggest challenges of the AI age. The advantage Ikea built with its AI-related reskilling initiative started from a deficit. Ikea was famously slow to embrace e-commerce https://fortune.com/2020/12/07/ikea-catalog-2021-stops-publishing/ . It had built its business around getting people into massive warehouse stores, where the maze-like layout, stylish room displays, and Swedish meatballs encouraged hours-long visits. The formula was so effective that for some time e-commerce didn’t seem necessary. COVID cut that time short. When the pandemic hit, Ikea had to turn its shuttered stores into fulfillment centers almost overnight, which supercharged its e-commerce operations. Digital channels that generated negligible sales before COVID hit 30% of total sales last fiscal year and account for half of all sales in some regions, according to Ingka Group. That “hockey stick” growth, as Ingka chief digital officer Parag Parekh describes it, upended Ikea’s approach to customer service—the store clerk who “helps clarify everything.” But e-commerce customers still had questions, and they hit the phones to track down answers. Ikea’s call centers quickly became overwhelmed, fielding up to three times their normal volume. Most customer queries were fairly basic or about existing orders—prime targets for automation. The key to successful reskilling is finding and leveraging skill adjacencies, says Prasanna Tambe, a professor of operations, information, and decisions at Wharton. Ikea, he says, offers a good example of how to redeploy workers’ domain expertise in new and more useful ways. “Companies have for so long been in a mode where they’re using people to satisfy things that customers need ,” he says. “The question is, is there an opportunity to move these people into providing things that customers want?” If a customer wants to air complaints about a delivery or requests help piecing together Ikea’s modular furniture systems, they’re now routed to a human who can explain, empathize, and—if the opportunity presents itself—upsell. It took two years for Ikea to reskill its 8,500 customer service workers as its Billie bot grew more and more capable. Through in-person and online classes, the trainees became experts on using Ikea’s digital room-planning tools. They also learned how to ask the right questions in a planning session, from the basics about measurements and color preferences to the psychologically probing: “What is not working in the room?” and “How are you feeling?” The training takes five to six weeks for new hires who go through it now. There’s also an employee-satisfaction element to Ikea’s program. Workers often regard automation in their workplaces with a sense of dread https://fortune.com/2026/04/23/ai-anxiety-workers-job-insecurity-fobo-ceos/ . A February 2026 global survey of 12,000 workers and business leaders by Mercer found that 40% of workers fear AI will make their job obsolete, up from 28% in 2024. Richard Richardson, who works at a remote-sales center in Sheffield, England, says he never felt any kind of apprehension about being displaced when Ikea introduced the Billie bot. He went through a slew of training modules, including a two-week “kitchen school” to learn the ins and outs of the company’s product lines, and made field trips to a nearby Ikea store to study the countertops up close. He remembers noticing how wood grain lined up along joints, and now he can tell a customer that the Havsen sink needs to be paired with a drawer front to cover the waste pipe. One training on communication taught him the importance of letting customers tell their side of the story before jumping in to answer—a tip he still uses today. AI is great at knowing the by-the-book “terms and conditions,” https://fortune.com/2025/10/10/klarna-ceo-sebastian-siemiatkowski-halved-workforce-says-tech-ceos-sugarcoating-ai-impact-on-jobs/ Richardson says, but it can’t yet determine “what the customer has already been offered” and “what we can do to resolve the problem further.” It also might miss opportunities to make a sale: The primary goal of Richardson’s team is solving customer problems—but workers still ask callers if they’d like to add items to an order that’s already being delivered for free. One big question that hangs over Ikea’s experiment is whether Billie will come for these workers’ new roles, as it did for their customer service jobs. Parekh didn’t rule out future layoffs, but said any cuts would likely be the result of macroeconomic factors, not necessarily AI. And workers might take some reassurance from the fact that even though Ikea offers free partially automated design tools on its website, some portion of customers are still opting for the consulting sessions with human design advisors which are also free . In the past fiscal year, Ikea workers helped 10 million customers via its remote-sales centers like the one in Helsingborg. Ikea’s product catalog is vast. Home renovations are expensive, and there’s nuance to designing a home, like positioning a dishwasher so you don’t trip over its open door between the sink and the stovetop. For some situations, customers simply want the input of a human, not a bot. After solving the hexagonal countertop conundrum, Barr unpacks new slab samples that are on display in the Helsingborg center, so sales specialists can touch the real thing. Her favorite is Lockebo, a composite worktop made from recycled glass that comes in shades of white and gray, with a marble effect. Customers rely on the advisors to tell them what it’s like to live with the materials they’re considering, Barr says. They want to know what a cook surface feels like to the fingertips, or whether a knob clicks satisfyingly when it’s turned. Those are questions a bot like Billie can’t answer now—and it’s hard to imagine it ever will. t This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Ikea’s human upgrade.” The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy, Nov. 16-17 in Detroit.