In financial year 2021, Ingka deployed an AI chatbot named Billie — named after IKEA’s Billy bookcase — across its customer service channels (Ingka Group, June 2023). Between 2021 and 2023, Billie resolved approximately 47% of all the customer enquiries it received, around 3.2 million interactions, saving the company close to EUR 13 million in operating costs (Ingka Group, June 2023). That left the question every knowledge-and-service business eventually faces once a bot proves itself: had Ingka just made roughly half of its call-centre capacity redundant, or had it freed that capacity for something else? Rather than treat Billie’s resolution rate purely as a cost story, Ingka studied the 53% of enquiries the bot could not resolve, and found they clustered heavily around one theme — customers were not just asking whether a sofa was in stock, they wanted to know whether it would actually work in their living room (Reuters, June 2023).

Two paths were available. Path A: the conventional AI-first route — would have treated Billie’s 47% resolution rate as a direct headcount opportunity, shrinking the call-centre workforce roughly in proportion to the volume the bot now handled and booking the savings. A version of that path played out elsewhere in the same period: Klarna replaced the equivalent of 700 customer-service agents with an OpenAI-powered chatbot and froze hiring for over a year, only to start rehiring humans in 2025 after its own CEO admitted that “cost was a too predominant evaluation factor” and that the approach had produced lower-quality service on the cases that mattered most (Bloomberg, May 2025). Path B: the route Ingka chose — used the demand signal buried in Billie’s unresolved queries to build an entirely new line of business, and reskilled the freed-up call-centre workforce to run it rather than reducing it. Ingka’s leadership stated this position explicitly when discussing the rollout with Reuters in June 2023:

Asked directly whether the rise of AI was likely to lead to job cuts at the company, Biesèrt was equally direct: “That’s not what we’re seeing right now” (Reuters, June 2023).

Since its financial year 2021 launch, Billie has run around the clock across IKEA’s customer service channels, using AI and natural language processing to handle order tracking, product information, delivery questions and basic recommendations in multiple languages simultaneously (Ingka Group, June 2023). Ingka’s Chief Digital Officer Parag Parekh framed the bot as a personalisation layer rather than a substitute for advice: “This level of personalization is not only going to continue to improve but will enhance customer satisfaction and increase loyalty overall” (Ingka Group, June 2023).

The reskilling programme moved 8,500 call-centre co-workers into a newly built remote interior design service, training them in remote interior design competence, digital retail sales, relationship-building and the complex problem-solving Billie could not handle (Ingka Group, June 2023). The service is delivered entirely by phone and video call: in the UK, for example, customers could book a 45–60 minute interior design consultation for £25, or a three-session workspace design package including a floorplan and 3D visuals for £125 (Reuters, June 2023). By mid-2023 the service had grown from its original launches in parts of Europe, Australia and the United Arab Emirates into the UK and United States (Reuters, June 2023).

Around the reskilling programme, Ingka also built customer-facing AI tools. In 2022 it launched IKEA Kreativ, an AI and computer-vision design tool — built on technology from Geomagical Labs, a Silicon Valley AI specialist Ingka had acquired in 2020 — that lets customers photograph their own rooms and digitally redesign them with IKEA products in 3D (Ingka Group, July 2022). In February 2024, it added an IKEA AI Assistant inside OpenAI’s GPT Store, giving US customers a generative-AI design and shopping tool built on top of its catalogue, alongside an internal AI education programme that aimed to train more than 3,000 employees that year (Ingka Group, Feb 2024).

That internal programme has since scaled considerably. An AI Digital Policy now requires an ethical risk assessment of every AI-integrated product and sets explicit red lines against uses such as human surveillance, algorithmic hiring bias and synthetic deception, while staff are encouraged to experiment with tools such as the internal “Hej Copilot” (Ingka Group, June 2025). Ingka has signed the EU AI Pact and joined the Partnership on AI, and by November 2025 it had been featured in the European Commission’s Repository of AI Literacy Practices for a foundational course called “Say Hej to AI” aimed at most of its more than 160,000 co-workers (Ingka Group, Nov 2025).

This is a reskilling case, not an upskilling one: the 8,500 affected co-workers (Ingka Group, June 2023) did not become better at the same call-centre job, they moved into a different role and function entirely — from answering routine service queries to delivering paid interior design advice — which is exactly the from-role-to-role shift the reskilling definition requires.

The HI insight is in what Ingka did with the chatbot’s failures rather than just its successes. Most companies measure a customer-service bot purely by what it resolves; Ingka studied what it could not resolve, on the logic that an unmet need that keeps showing up at scale is a demand signal rather than a cost problem to be eliminated. Billie’s unresolved queries pointed at a real, underserved need — the kind of contextual design judgment a chatbot cannot offer — and Ingka built a paid human service around exactly that, staffed by the people Billie had freed up rather than people hired from outside. The result was not a saving; it was a new, higher-margin revenue line worth more than 3% of total group revenue within a year, with a public target of reaching 10% (Reuters, June 2023).

The 2026 layoffs sharpen the case rather than undermine it, because they show where the company’s stated commitment actually held under pressure. The cuts that came once macroeconomic conditions turned — declining sales, US tariffs, a weaker consumer — landed on corporate Group Functions at both Ingka Group and Inter IKEA Group (Ingka Group, March 2026; Inter IKEA Group, May 2026), not on the reskilled, customer-facing workforce at the centre of this case (Retail Dive, May 2026). The specific, public, trackable figure from 2023 — 8,500 co-workers moved, zero redundancies from that transition — has not been revised in three years of scrutiny (Ingka Group, June 2023; Reuters, June 2023), even as the wider company absorbed unrelated cost pressure elsewhere. The honest version of the IKEA case is not that the company “never does layoffs.” It is that when AI did the displacing, Ingka chose to reskill rather than cut, and the business case for that choice — a billion-euro revenue line built from a workforce that would otherwise have been a cost to eliminate (Reuters, June 2023) — has held up for three years and counting.