What IKEA did with 8,500 employees replaced by AI

One of the most fundamental lessons of lean manufacturing is that people aren’t resources; they’re assets to be tended and developed. As Toyota has long said of their famed system, “we build people, not just cars.” 

Like many old lessons, it works just as well today as it always has. I was reminded of this recently when I read about IKEA’s successful introduction of a new AI customer service chatbot that handles so-called “repetitive” questions (store opening hours, rules about pets, etc). Between 2021 and 2023, the bot resolved about 47% of customer inquiries and produced roughly $14 million in savings. By July 2026 it was able to help 74% of the customers who used it.

So far, so good, right? But it’s what they did with the 8500 call center workers the chatbot replaced that brought that lean manufacturing principle to mind. Instead of firing them, IKEA retrained them and reaped far greater benefits than some short-term cost cutting by investing in their growth and in the company’s future: “When so many companies are measuring success in AI adoption by how many expenses they can cut and how many workers they can let go, IKEA is treating the technology as a way to free up human workers for higher-margin work that boosts its bottom line.” 

Those 8500 employees now handle more complicated customer issues and also work as remote interior design consultants for the company. The results of this decision are now starting to show up on IKEA’s books. The news is very good not just because thousands of people didn't lose their jobs but also on the financial front. In 2025, they brought in $1.37 billion in sales, up from $1.17 billion the year before and the remote sales channel has grown 15% to 20% a year for three years, the fastest of any IKEA sales channel. 

“Ingka chief digital officer Parag Parekh described the curve to Fortune as “hockey stick” growth.” (shout out to the hockey stick chart – another blast from The Lean Startup past!).

But wait – aren’t we talking about IKEA? What’s Ingka? This is where the story crosses paths with Incorruptible. In the book, I included this detailed diagram of IKEA’s ownership structure. The IKEA concept and trademark are owned by one entity, while most stores are run by Ingka, which is a foundation-owned franchisee. Founder Ingvar Kamprad designed this structure in the early 1980s to ensure IKEA’s independence and mission would outlive him. 

Ingka is what I call a “mission guardian entity” or “spiritual holding company” (Kamprad himself described his actions as a way of trying to give the IKEA brand “eternal life”.)  By placing the trademark under foundation control, Kamprad made it impossible to sell or extract value from the brand. The stores can’t abandon the mission without losing the right to the IKEA name. 

And that mission, as he detailed at length in his 1976 manifesto of sorts, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, is not unlike Toyota’s, or any company that cares deeply about human flourishing while also keeping the practicalities of ensuring it firmly in mind: “To create a better everyday life for the many people”. It points directly to retraining rather than firing. Here are just a few more snippets to inspire you:  

Things may have looked a little different in 1976 than they do now (more machines, fewer chatbots), but his ethos is still the same one that fueled Incorruptible: “Let us continue to be a group of positive fanatics who stubbornly and persistently refuse to accept the impossible and the negative. What we want to do, we can do and will do together.”

If you’d like to be a part of a group talking about these ideas, you’re welcome to join our conversations and live workshops in the Incorruptible Community. Join for free here: https://community.incorruptible.co/

When you join, you can RSVP to our free virtual events. Coming up:

• Book Club on The Invisible Leader (Chapter 8 of Incorruptible): Wednesday, November 4 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Join the community to RSVP.

• Lean Startup in the Age of AI: Wednesday, November 11 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Join the community to RSVP.

• Sensing and Steering Mission Drive: Wednesday, November 18 at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Join the community to RSVP.

For your podcast queue, this week I’m sharing this conversation with Leah Solivan, founder of Taskrabbit, which includes Leah’s story about selling Taskrabbit to IKEA. Enjoy!