What IKEA understood about AI that most businesses miss.

When a chatbot took over nearly half their customer calls, the obvious move was to cut staff. They did the opposite, and built a billion-euro business doing it.

There’s a version of the AI story everyone already knows. A company automates a job, the people who did it lose it, and the savings go to the bottom line. It makes owners nervous and staff more nervous still. It’s also, mostly, a failure of imagination rather than a law of nature.

IKEA tells a different story, and it’s worth understanding in detail. It’s the clearest example we know of AI done with thought rather than haste.

What actually happened

In 2021, Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee, introduced an AI chatbot called Billie to handle customer enquiries. Billie was good at exactly the work that fills a call centre: order tracking, delivery times, opening hours, returns. By 2023 it was handling around 47% of enquiries, about 3.2 million conversations, and saving close to €13 million.

The usual playbook is obvious. If a machine handles nearly half your calls, you need roughly half as many people answering them. IKEA didn’t run that calculation. They looked at the other 53%.

The insight in the numbers

The enquiries Billie couldn’t handle weren’t failures. They were a signal. Customers weren’t just asking where their order was. They wanted help: how to lay out a room, how to combine pieces, how to solve storage in an awkward space. That needs taste, judgment and a human conversation.

The demand had always been there. Staff were simply too busy with routine queries to notice it. By taking the repetitive work away, Billie exposed what customers actually wanted from a person.

So IKEA retrained 8,500 call centre staff as interior design advisers. The service they now run made €1.3 billion in a single year.

People who’d spent years staying calm with frustrated customers had exactly the right foundation for it.

Why it matters for your business

Most businesses think of AI as a way to do the same things more cheaply. That’s the least interesting thing it can do, and usually the least valuable.

IKEA asked a better question: now the routine work is handled, what becomes possible? The answer was a service customers had been quietly asking for all along, staffed by people who already worked there.

You don’t need to be IKEA for this to apply. Every business has work that doesn’t need a person, and people too tied up in it to do their best work. The skill isn’t deploying the tool. It’s asking the right question once it’s in place.

That question is exactly where we start.