IKEA Found a Better Way to Use AI

October 17, 2026


IKEA automated nearly half of its customer inquiries, retrained approximately 8,500 employees and reported millions in savings. Its approach offers an alternative to treating AI primarily as a tool for cutting payroll.


For many businesses, the financial appeal of artificial intelligence is straightforward. If software can perform work previously handled by employees, operating costs could fall.


But IKEA's experience raises another question: What happens when a company uses AI to eliminate repetitive tasks without eliminating the people who used to perform them?


The furniture retailer offers a useful example of how automation, employee development and new sales opportunities can work together.


Automating 47% of customer inquiries


IKEA introduced an AI-powered customer-service chatbot called Billie to handle routine inquiries.


Between 2021 and 2023, Billie handled approximately 47% of customer inquiries, taking on questions about orders, deliveries, returns and other common service issues.


The benefits were significant. IKEA reported approximately €13 million in savings associated with automating customer inquiries.


For a company operating at IKEA's scale, automating repetitive conversations can reduce the workload placed on customer-service teams and improve the efficiency of support operations.


That alone would have made the technology valuable.


But IKEA did not stop at automation.


What happened to 8,500 employees?


Rather than treating the automation of routine customer-service work solely as an opportunity to eliminate positions, IKEA invested in retraining approximately 8,500 call-center employees.


The company redirected workers toward more complex customer interactions, including remote interior-design consultations and sales.


These responsibilities required a different set of skills.


Instead of primarily answering questions about delivery dates or order status, employees could help customers plan living spaces, choose furniture and make purchasing decisions.


AI could handle repetitive inquiries while employees concentrated on interactions requiring product knowledge, judgment and personal assistance.


The distinction is important.


Automating a task does not necessarily mean that the employee performing it has become unnecessary. It may mean that the employee's time can be used differently.


Turning customer service into a sales opportunity


IKEA also expanded its remote interior-design and sales services.


Through these services, customers could receive assistance planning rooms, selecting furniture and making purchases without visiting a physical store.


This created an opportunity for employees with customer-service experience to contribute more directly to revenue-generating activities.


A conventional support interaction typically begins when a customer needs help resolving a problem.


A remote-sales consultation can go further. It can help a customer understand their options, build confidence in a purchase and complete an order.


For IKEA, this meant that employees previously associated with routine customer support could take on responsibilities connected to sales and customer relationships.


The company was not simply finding ways to answer the same questions at a lower cost. It was also developing new ways to serve customers.


A remote-sales business generating approximately €1.25 billion


According to Fortune's July 2026 reporting, IKEA's remote-sales channel generated approximately €1.25 billion in revenue during fiscal 2025.


Fortune also reported that remote sales had become IKEA's fastest-growing sales channel for three consecutive years, with annual growth of approximately 15% to 20%.


Those figures are substantial, but they require an important distinction.


The €1.25 billion represents revenue from IKEA's broader remote-sales operation. It should not be interpreted as revenue directly generated by its AI chatbot or attributed entirely to retrained employees.


Remote-sales performance depends on numerous factors, including customer demand, service development, marketing, product availability and execution.


Nevertheless, the figures provide context for the business IKEA was developing alongside its investment in automation and employee retraining.


The company was pursuing operational efficiency while expanding a channel where employees could contribute to sales.


Two ways to approach AI


Consider two companies introducing similar AI systems into their customer-service departments.


The first company focuses primarily on reducing payroll.


It automates routine tasks, determines how many positions are no longer required and reduces staffing accordingly.


That can be a legitimate business strategy, particularly when the work eliminated by automation cannot be productively redirected.


The second company considers an additional possibility.


It automates the same repetitive tasks but evaluates whether employees can be retrained for responsibilities that produce more value.


Those responsibilities might include sales, customer retention, account management, product education or more complex service interactions.


Both approaches can improve efficiency.


The difference is that the second also explores whether the time released by automation can support business growth.


IKEA's experience illustrates this broader approach.


The opportunity for smaller businesses


The principle is not limited to multinational retailers.


Imagine a business where employees spend several hours each day answering routine emails, entering information into systems, updating customers or preparing repetitive reports.


AI and automation could reduce that workload.


The immediate financial question might be how much staffing the business could eliminate.


But another question deserves attention: What could those employees accomplish with the time they recover?


A customer-service representative might spend more time helping existing customers make additional purchases.


An administrative employee might take on order coordination or account-management responsibilities.


A marketing employee might shift from repetitive production tasks toward campaign testing, customer research and conversion improvements.


These changes are not automatically profitable. Retraining requires investment, employees need appropriate skills, and the business must have productive work available.


But evaluating those opportunities before making staffing decisions can reveal options that a cost-cutting exercise alone might overlook.


The bigger lesson from IKEA


IKEA's reported results show that AI-driven customer-service automation can produce meaningful savings.


Its decision to retrain thousands of employees also demonstrates another use of the technology: changing what people do rather than assuming that automated work must translate directly into fewer workers.


The lesson is not that businesses should never replace jobs with AI.


It is that headcount reduction should not automatically be the only measure of success.


A company might save money by automating work. It might also create more value by using the capacity that automation releases.


For business owners evaluating AI, both possibilities deserve consideration.


The most valuable AI strategy may not be the one that eliminates the most jobs. It may be the one that produces the strongest overall business results.



Sources

Your Next Marketer Might Need to Code

October 26, 2026
Marketing is becoming more technical. As businesses adopt AI tools, automation and increasingly complex software, a new kind of specialist is emerging: the marketing engineer. For years, businesses have built marketing teams around familiar responsibilities: advertising, content creation, search engine optimization, social media and lead generation. Those responsibilities haven't disappeared. But the technology behind them has become increasingly complicated. Businesses now rely on advertising platforms, customer relationship management systems, email automation, website analytics, e-commerce software and AI tools. Making those systems work together is becoming an important part of marketing performance. That's where the marketing engineer comes in. What Is a Marketing Engineer? A marketing engineer combines marketing knowledge with technical skills. Traditional marketing specialists might develop a campaign strategy, create content or manage advertising budgets. A marketing engineer can help build the technical systems that make those activities more effective. That might involve connecting a CRM to advertising platforms, automating reporting, improving conversion tracking, integrating customer data or developing workflows using APIs and AI tools. The role connects marketing strategy with technical execution. Rather than relying entirely on separate developers, analysts and software specialists, businesses can use technical marketing expertise to bridge those functions. The Problem With Disconnected Marketing Systems Many businesses already have the technology they need. The challenge is getting it to work together. A company might use Google Ads to attract customers, Shopify to process orders, Klaviyo for email marketing and a CRM to manage relationships. Each platform collects information, but that doesn't necessarily mean the information is connected. Employees may still need to download reports, transfer leads between systems, update spreadsheets or manually compare campaign results against actual sales. Those disconnected processes can make marketing slower and more difficult to measure. Marketing engineering focuses on improving the connections between systems. When information moves reliably between platforms, businesses can reduce repetitive work and make decisions using more complete data. AI Search Is Changing How Businesses Get Discovered Technical marketing is also becoming more relevant as AI-powered search develops. Traditional search engine optimization focuses on helping websites appear in organic search results. But customers increasingly use AI-powered tools to research products, compare services and find answers. That has brought greater attention to two related concepts. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) focuses on making information clear, accessible and useful for answer-based discovery. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on improving how content can be discovered, understood and potentially referenced by generative AI systems. These approaches overlap with established SEO practices, including technically accessible websites, useful content and clear information architecture. They do not guarantee inclusion in AI-generated answers. For businesses, the practical lesson is that website content and technical structure need to support more than traditional search rankings. Automation Can Eliminate Repetitive Marketing Work Another opportunity is workflow automation. Marketing departments often spend considerable time on tasks that don't require much creative judgment. Downloading reports, updating spreadsheets, transferring customer information, preparing campaign summaries and moving data between applications are common examples. Many of these activities can be automated when systems are properly connected. That doesn't eliminate the need for marketers. It can give them more time to focus on strategy, creative development, customer relationships and improving campaign performance. The objective isn't to automate everything. It's to identify which tasks can be handled more reliably and efficiently through technology. Better Data Can Lead to Better Marketing Decisions One of the biggest challenges in marketing is understanding which activities actually contribute to revenue. A campaign might generate thousands of impressions, hundreds of clicks and dozens of leads without producing profitable customers. Marketing engineers can help businesses connect advertising activity with customer and sales information. That includes improving conversion tracking, integrating data sources and identifying where potential customers drop out of the buying process. The goal is to move beyond reporting what happened on an advertising platform and develop a clearer understanding of what happened across the business. Does Your Business Need a Marketing Engineer? Not every company needs to hire a full-time technical marketing specialist. For smaller businesses, the first step is identifying where disconnected systems, manual processes or unreliable data are creating problems. Consider whether your advertising and sales platforms share information, whether campaign performance can be connected to revenue and whether repetitive reporting tasks could be automated. It is also worth reviewing whether your website is technically accessible, well structured and capable of answering the questions potential customers are asking. Depending on the complexity of the business, these improvements might be handled by an internal employee, an outside specialist or a combination of both. The important decision isn't necessarily who to hire. It's determining which capabilities the business actually needs. The Future of Marketing Is More Connected Creative thinking, compelling messaging and customer relationships remain essential to effective marketing. But those strengths increasingly depend on the technology supporting them. Businesses need systems that communicate, data that can be trusted and processes that allow teams to work efficiently. Marketing engineering represents one approach to bringing those capabilities together. The next competitive advantage may not come from producing more content or launching more campaigns. It may come from building a marketing operation where everything works together.

P&G Rebuilt Its Operations and Saved $600 Million. Here's How.

October 23, 2026
Procter & Gamble didn't simply outsource its support operations. It first rebuilt how they worked, then brought in outside partners. By 2008, its business-services transformation had generated approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. In the late 1990s, Procter & Gamble faced a problem familiar to businesses of almost every size: too many teams performing similar work. Finance, human resources and other support functions were spread across different parts of the company. That meant duplicated activities, inconsistent processes and unnecessary costs. Instead of continuing to expand those departments independently, P&G decided to fundamentally change how its business operated. First, P&G Fixed Its Internal Operations In 1999, P&G began bringing its support functions into a single global organization. Over the following three years, the company consolidated and standardized more than 70 services. It also established shared-service centers to support operations around the world. The goal was to replace fragmented systems with a more consistent and efficient operating structure. Importantly, P&G didn't begin by handing all these functions to outside companies. It first reorganized how the work was performed internally. That foundation would make the next phase possible. Then Came $4.2 Billion in Outsourcing Agreements In 2003, P&G entered into outsourcing partnerships valued at approximately $4.2 billion. Outside specialists took responsibility for selected operations, including IT infrastructure, payroll support, accounts payable and facilities management. Rather than maintaining every capability internally, P&G could rely on partners with specialized expertise, established systems and the scale to manage these activities. But it didn't outsource everything. The company retained control of functions it considered strategically important, including procurement, logistics, IT architecture and technology-driven innovation. This distinction was central to the strategy. P&G wasn't trying to eliminate internal operations. It was deciding which activities made sense to manage itself and which could be handled more effectively by partners. The Benefits Went Beyond Cost Savings One of the clearest examples came during P&G's integration of Gillette. According to P&G's business-services leadership, its established systems and outsourcing partners helped the company mobilize approximately 750 additional people within weeks. The business-services integration was completed in 15 months, a process its leadership believed could otherwise have taken three to four years. That flexibility mattered. P&G could draw on existing capabilities and outside resources without having to build every part of the operation from scratch. By 2008, the company's broader business-services transformation had produced approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. Those savings came from a combination of internal consolidation, standardized processes and selective outsourcing, not outsourcing alone. What Smaller Businesses Can Learn Most businesses aren't managing P&G's scale or negotiating multibillion-dollar agreements. But the underlying decision is surprisingly relevant. As companies grow, they often add employees and departments without reconsidering how work gets done. Over time, the same problems can emerge: duplicated tasks, fragmented responsibilities, rising administrative costs and employees spending too much time on activities outside their core expertise. The first step isn't necessarily outsourcing. It's understanding the operation. Which processes are inefficient? Which functions require direct internal control? Which activities could a specialist handle more effectively? Customer support, bookkeeping, administrative work, creative production and certain technology operations may be candidates for outside support, depending on the business. But outsourcing a poorly defined process can simply transfer the problem to someone else. P&G's experience illustrates a more disciplined approach: improve the system, identify which capabilities are strategically important and use external partners where they offer a genuine advantage. You Don't Have to Build Everything In-House The most important lesson from P&G's transformation isn't that every business should outsource more. It's that growth doesn't require owning and managing every operational function. By combining stronger internal processes with carefully selected partners, businesses can reduce unnecessary complexity and concentrate their resources where they create the most value. Sometimes the smartest way to grow isn't to build another department. It's to rethink how the work gets done. Sources McKinsey & Company, From internal service provider to strategic partner: An interview with the head of Global Business Services at P&G (2008). Procter & Gamble, 2008 Annual Report.