IKEA Didn’t Just Automate. It Decided.

Have you heard about IKEA’s AI adoption experience? In a nutshell, AI began handling routine customer inquiries. Rather than laying off the affected call-centre employees, IKEA retrained approximately 8,500 people to handle more complex customer issues or work as remote interior design sales advisors. Revenue from those remote-sales centres reached about C$2 billion (€1.25 billion) in the last fiscal year, growing 15 to 20 percent annually for three years running.

It’s a compelling case study. And it’s being widely shared as proof that AI and workforce stability can coexist.

What’s getting less attention is what made it possible.

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Treat AI Adoption as a Governance Decision

As IKEA prepared to introduce Billie, and as the chatbot became more capable, its leaders faced another decision. Not simply a technical decision about what the chatbot could handle. A governance decision: what happens to the people whose work it changes?

IKEA didn’t wait until automation had displaced thousands of employees to confront that question. It developed the technology and its workforce strategy together.

IKEA chose to retrain its call-centre employees for more complex customer inquiries or sales-oriented design roles—work that relied more heavily on judgment, empathy and the ability to understand what a customer really needed.

That didn’t happen by accident. It required IKEA to invest in its people as much as it invested in technology.

Don't Dismiss the Lesson as Only for Big Companies

This story is easy to dismiss as a luxury available only to large, privately held companies with long time horizons. IKEA is private. It doesn't face the same quarterly pressure that might force a listed company to take the faster, cheaper route.

Worth noting: IKEA’s two major corporate groups also laid off hundreds of corporate employees earlier this year to streamline operations and keep prices competitive. According to Fortune, those cuts were unrelated to AI and didn’t affect the remote-sales centres.

That’s still a fair observation about scale and ownership. And it still misses the point.

As for the governance question: what do we do with the people whose work changes? It isn’t a question only large companies need to answer. Every organization using AI to change how work gets done needs to consider it at its own scale and in its own context. Organizations that address it early can plan rather than react.

Measure Value Beyond Cost Savings

The results suggest the approach created value beyond cost savings. The remote-sales centres became IKEA’s fastest-growing sales channel, while its in-house customer happiness score reached 89 percent, up from 60 percent before Billie was introduced.

IKEA didn’t simply automate routine work. It redesigned how technology and people could work together—and built a growing sales channel in the process.

Decide Who Decides When AI Changes How Work Gets Done

This is the conversation we’re trying to advance at Codecision.

The conversation needs to move beyond whether organizations should use AI or which tools they should adopt. Those answers will vary depending on the organization, its people and its goals.

The more important question is: who decides, and on what basis, when AI changes how work gets done?

In many organizations, these decisions are still driven primarily by whoever controls technology procurement. Sometimes that’s IT. Sometimes it’s a single executive. Less often, it’s a cross-functional group with a clear framework for weighing business outcomes alongside workforce implications, customer impact and organizational values.

Plan for the Workforce Impact, Not Just the Tools

IKEA’s reskilling initiative was notable partly because it took two years to retrain its 8,500 workers as the Billie bot’s capabilities grew. That type of timeline requires patience and planning. It’s an investment that suggests the workforce implications were treated as a strategic consideration, and not left to the operational teams to address afterward.

The broader context matters. The World Economic Forum estimates that structural changes in the labour market—including technological advances such as AI—could displace 92 million jobs by 2030 while creating 170 million new roles. It also estimates that 39 percent of workers’ existing skills will change or become outdated.

The gap between displacement and opportunity doesn’t close on its own. Organizations close it through their choices about training, role design, human judgment, and the kind of employer they intend to be.

IKEA didn’t just implement AI. It made deliberate decisions about how people would work alongside it.

Build a Process for Answering the Hard Questions

Your organization doesn’t need to be IKEA to ask the same questions. But it does need a process for answering them.

Where is AI already changing how work gets done in your organization? Have you been intentional about deciding what should happen next?

If your team needs a process for making those decisions, Codecision can help. Learn more at Codecision.io.