When Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer, rolled out an AI chatbot named Billie, it could have read the result as a headcount story. Between 2021 and 2023, Billie resolved about 47 percent of the customer enquiries it received, roughly 3.2 million interactions, and saved nearly 13 million euros, according to Ingka Group. On paper, that is a case for a smaller call centre.
Instead, Ingka pointed the freed-up capacity at demand a call centre was never built to serve. It reskilled 8,500 co-workers into remote interior design, digital retail sales, and relationship-led selling, putting design expertise in front of far more customers. Sales through its remote customer meeting points reached 1.3 billion euros by the end of FY22, about 3.3 percent of total sales, with the aim of growing that share to 10 percent in the next few years. The capacity AI freed up did not become a severance line. It became a new revenue stream.
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, Ingka Group People & Culture Manager, to Reuters
Redeploying 8,500 people looks obvious in hindsight. In the moment, it assumes you can answer a hard question: of those 8,500, who already has an eye for space and proportion, who has done design-adjacent work, who has the client instincts a premium service depends on, and who could get there with a few weeks of training. Most companies cannot answer that with any confidence.
An HRIS will tell you who sat in the call centre. It will not tell you what they can actually do, or what they are a short step from doing. That information exists. It is scattered across resumes, projects, and the heads of managers, and almost never captured where a leader can reach it in the moment the decision lands.
Without that view, redeployment is a leap of faith, so the safer-looking move is to cut now and rehire later. With it, redeployment becomes a plan: here are the people whose skills already point toward the new work, here are the ones who are close, here is what the training has to cover.
AI is going to keep freeing up capacity. The question every leader will face is whether that capacity becomes a new line of business or a layoff followed by a quiet rehire. That question is hard to answer well when you cannot see, in one place, what your workforce can actually do.