Everyone's asking which jobs AI will eliminate. I went looking for the leaders asking the better question. The best answer I found was five years old.
I'm an optimist about AI. Not the efficiency story everyone is telling right now, but the bigger one underneath it. What a company can become when its people are freed from the work that never really needed them in the first place.
So I went looking for it. Recent examples of teams that used AI to drive real efficiency and then pointed those freed up people at something new. Something that created significant value that didn't exist before.
The best example I found is five years old. IKEA, 2021. I kept searching for something more recent and better, and I kept landing back on the same story. That's either a gap in my research or a gap in our collective imagination. After a week of looking, I think it's mostly the second one.
Here's the story, because it's still the best example of the thing I wish more of us were doing.
The IKEA reframe
In 2021, IKEA's chatbot Billie (named for the Billy bookcase) started handling close to half of all customer service inquiries. That put 8,500 call center workers in front of a very familiar headline. AI absorbs the routine work. The roles become redundant. You restructure. The stock ticks up. You've read that headline.
IKEA's leaders asked a different question. Not "which roles can we eliminate?" but "what can our people do now that they couldn't do before?"
What can our people do now that they couldn't do before?
What they found was an entire layer of demand they'd never noticed. The inquiries Billie couldn't resolve weren't complaints. They were customers asking for help designing their spaces. Which couch fits a small living room. How to make a tiny kitchen work. Personalized design expertise, the one thing IKEA had never figured out how to scale.
So IKEA retrained the call center team as remote interior design advisors, and built the tools to make them capable of it. Their Kreativ platform uses AI room scanning and 3D visualization to let an advisor walk a customer through a redesigned space in real time, placing real products into a virtual version of a real room. Someone with two weeks of training and the right AI tool can now deliver a consultation that used to require a degree and a site visit.
The technology didn't replace the person. It made the person capable of something they never could have done before.
That channel generated 1.3 billion euros in fiscal year 2022, about 3.3% of Ingka Group's total sales, with a target of 10% by 2028. A new business line, built from the same people most companies would've let go. And they did it in 2021 and 2022, years before the rest of us started learning this lesson the hard way.
By the numbers
€1.3B. Revenue from IKEA's retrained design channel in fiscal year 2022. A line that didn't exist before AI.
47%. Customer inquiries handled by Billie, IKEA's chatbot, since 2021.
8,500. Call center workers retrained as interior design advisors. Zero layoffs.
75%. Consumers who say a fast, AI-driven response still left them frustrated (Glance 2026 CX Trends Report). Speed alone isn't winning anyone over.
Ingka Group / Reuters · Glance 2026 CX Trends Report
The 2026 pattern in the other direction
Now look at what's happening right now, in 2026. Klarna's chatbot was doing the work of 700 agents, so the company froze hiring and bet AI could carry the rest. Customer satisfaction fell, complaints climbed, and by 2025 it was rehiring people. Its CEO admitted it plainly: "We focused too much on efficiency and cost. The result was lower quality, and that's not sustainable."
Block did its own version in February. Jack Dorsey cut about 40% of the company, roughly 4,000 of 10,000 people, citing AI productivity gains. The stock jumped 17%. Within weeks the technical leads started leaving and the rehiring began.
This is becoming a pattern with its own price tag. A Careerminds survey of 600 HR leaders this February found that a third of companies who ran AI-driven layoffs had already rehired a quarter to half of those roles. Forrester found that 55% of employers regret laying people off for AI. The cut is the easy move. It's also, increasingly, the expensive one.
The harder half
Last issue I wrote about Eric Porres at Logitech and the question he asks every team: what have you deleted? IKEA is the proof of what's supposed to happen after the deletion. They deleted the old call center model, then answered the harder question. What do we create in its place? Most companies stop at the first half.
And here's the part that gets lost when people call this "just a better question." It took courage. The efficiency play was sitting right there, the one Wall Street rewards and a CFO can model in a spreadsheet. IKEA chose to bet a meaningful part of its business on a different idea: that freed up people, given a vision and the right tools, create more than eliminated people do. As I wrote in Issue #12, The Leader's Dilemma, "lean into AI" isn't a vision and "get more efficient" isn't a vision. A vision is: here's what this company becomes, here's where value moves, and here's how you fit.
Efficiency is the easy part. We've all been trained for it. Cut the cost, book the savings, move on. The harder thing, the thing almost nobody in my search was doing well, is to look at the capacity AI frees up and ask with real creativity and ingenuity: what could we build now? What could our people become? That's a different muscle than the one we've been trained on. For most of us, reinventing the business instead of just running it is completely new territory. It's also the one that matters most in this moment.
It should bother us that the best example I could find is five years old. Not because IKEA isn't worth studying. It absolutely is. But because in the most transformative technology shift of our careers, we should be generating these stories every month, not reaching back to 2021 for one. We can do better than this, and I believe we will, but only if we start treating AI as something to create with and not just something to cut with.
What to do this week
AI is already taking routine work off your team's plate. The opportunity most companies miss is what comes next: where that freed-up capacity goes. So this week, build a different kind of list. Not roles to cut, but customer or consumer problems you haven't solved yet. The questions your people field that you've never had a good answer for. The jobs your customers are quietly hiring someone else to do. IKEA found a billion-euro business sitting inside the queries its chatbot couldn't handle. Yours is probably hiding somewhere just as ordinary.
Then ask the question that actually matters. If you pointed your people at the biggest of those problems, what could they become, and what could you build? That's the frontier, and almost no one has reached it. Which is exactly why it's open.
From the portfolio
The question IKEA answered is the one most leadership teams are stuck on. They can see AI opening up capacity. The hard part is deciding where their people create the most value once it does, and most teams don't have a clear answer yet.
Board of Innovation is an AI Transformation Studio that helps mid-market and Fortune 500 companies redesign how their people, processes, and business models create value when AI changes the operating assumptions overnight. A full redesign of where value gets created, who creates it, and how the business captures it.
If "what could our people become" is a live question for you right now, that's the conversation BOI is built for. Reply and tell me where your team is stuck. I'll connect you with the right person there, and I'll jump in where it helps.
Most companies are using AI to do more with less. The few that pull away will use it to make their people capable of more. One is an efficiency play with a ceiling. The other is how IKEA built a new business out of the team everyone else would've cut.
Which brings me to a favor. I'm always on the hunt for great examples of AI being used not just to drive efficiency, but to create growth and new opportunities for the people doing the work. If you've got a great one, recent or not, I'd love to hear about it.
Anyone can cut. It takes a leader to create.
Talk Tuesday,
Jason Hauer
Founder & CEO, HauerX Holdings
jason@hauerX.com
Jason Hauer is the founder and CEO of HauerX Holdings, where he backs and builds a portfolio of AI-native companies that accelerate how businesses grow, operate, and compete. From mid-market to Fortune 500.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did IKEA do differently when its chatbot started absorbing customer service work?
In 2021, IKEA's chatbot Billie began handling close to half of customer service inquiries. Instead of asking which roles could be eliminated, IKEA's leaders asked what their 8,500 call center workers could do that they couldn't do before. They retrained the team as remote interior design advisors and built the Kreativ platform (AI room scanning and 3D visualization) to make them capable of delivering personalized design consultations at scale.
How much revenue did IKEA's retrained design channel generate?
€1.3 billion in fiscal year 2022, about 3.3% of Ingka Group's total sales, with a target of 10% by 2028. A new business line, built from the same people most companies would've let go.
What's happening with the AI-driven layoffs at Klarna and Block?
Klarna's chatbot was doing the work of 700 agents. Customer satisfaction fell, complaints climbed, and by 2025 it was rehiring. Its CEO said publicly: "We focused too much on efficiency and cost. The result was lower quality, and that's not sustainable." Block cut about 40% of its workforce (roughly 4,000 of 10,000 people) citing AI productivity gains. The stock jumped 17%. Within weeks the technical leads started leaving and the rehiring began. A Careerminds survey of 600 HR leaders found a third of companies who ran AI-driven layoffs had already rehired a quarter to half of those roles. Forrester found 55% of employers regret laying people off for AI.
What is the question IKEA's leaders asked?
Not "which roles can we eliminate?" but "what can our people do now that they couldn't do before?" That reframe is what turned a redundancy event into a billion-euro new business line.
What's the difference between using AI to cut and using AI to create?
Cutting is the easy move. It's the one Wall Street rewards and a CFO can model in a spreadsheet. Creating is the harder muscle: looking at the capacity AI frees up and asking what your people could become, then building the tools and the vision that make it real. Most companies are using AI to do more with less. The few that pull away will use it to make their people capable of more. Anyone can cut. It takes a leader to create.
