Room for humans | IKEA is showing employers the right way to use AI

For many workers, promises that artificial intelligence will remove repetitive tasks and create more meaningful work are becoming difficult to trust.

Such assurances often arrive alongside restructuring programmes, hiring freezes and warnings that entire categories of work could disappear. A February 2026 Mercer survey found that 40% of workers feared AI would make their job obsolete, up from 28% in 2024.

IKEA could easily have reinforced those fears when it introduced Billie, its AI-powered customer service chatbot, in 2021. The technology was designed to answer routine questions previously handled by call centre employees, from store opening times to whether customers could bring dogs inside.

Instead of using the resulting efficiencies to shed staff, however, IKEA retrained around 8,500 workers to manage more complicated customer problems and work as sales-oriented design advisers. It's an approach more employers should study.