Ikea upskills workers in interior design as AI handles calls

Furniture giant Ikea is training up thousands of call centre workers to become interior design advisers as artificial intelligence takes over their queries.

The chain, owned by Ingka Group, has trained 8,500 workers as advisers since 2021, according to a report in Reuters.

An AI customer service bot called Billie then answers common customer questions, and has handled 47% of queries to its call centres in the past two years.

Ulrika Biesert, global people and culture manager at Ingka Group, said the company was committed to “strengthening co-workers’ employability in Ingka, through lifelong learning and development and reskilling, and to accelerate the creation of new jobs”.

Ikea’s reskilling of workers comes as a number of reports suggest that workers are worried about AI replacing their roles – a recent report by Goldman Sachs suggested that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT could replace as many as 300 million jobs.

Biesert said that a reduction in headcount at Ikea was “not what we’re seeing right now”.

Her predictions are more in line with those from a survey by Experis, an IT recruitment business, which revealed that 54% of employers think AI technologies will actually have a positive impact on staff headcount.

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