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 example I kept coming back to was IKEA’s reskilling work, described by Ingka Group in June 2023. It is an older story that still raises a useful question about where people’s time goes after automation.
Here's the story, because it's still the best example of the thing I wish more of us were doing.
The IKEA reframe
Ingka Group reported that its Billie chatbot handled about 47% of customer inquiries received between 2021 and 2023. Alongside that shift, it said it had reskilled 8,500 customer-service coworkers in remote selling and interior-design advice.
The question I take from that is simple: what could our people do now that they couldn’t do before?
Remote advice gave customers another way to get help with their homes. Ingka described investments in remote selling, design services and digital tools as parts of a broader effort to make IKEA more accessible.
The reskilling matters because software alone does not prepare someone for a new role. People need training, useful tools and a clear idea of the service they are expected to deliver.
The opportunity is to use the capacity technology creates to help people take on valuable new work.
Ingka reported €1.3 billion in sales through its remote customer meeting points in fiscal 2022, representing 3.3% of sales. That figure covers the wider remote-sales channel. It is not revenue attributed to Billie, or proof that retrained design advisors created a new billion-euro business.
By the numbers
Source: Ingka Group, June 29, 2023. The sales total and reskilling count describe related activity; the source does not establish a causal revenue result.
The harder half
Last issue I wrote about Eric Porres at Logitech and the question he asks teams: what have you deleted? IKEA raises the next question. Once routine work changes, what do we help people do instead?
That takes a more complete plan than booking a saving. Leaders need to identify the customer need, prepare people for the new work and decide how they will know it is helping. “Lean into AI” isn’t a vision. A useful vision explains what the company can become and how people 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.
I want to see more examples of that kind of work. IKEA is worth studying because it makes reskilling concrete, even though the public figures do not tell us how much revenue the reskilling itself caused.
What to do this week.
This week, build a list of customer problems your team hasn’t had the time or capacity to solve. Look at the questions people keep fielding and the help customers seek elsewhere. Then ask which of those needs your team could take on as routine work changes.
Pick one promising need, give the team time to learn it, and agree on what you will measure. That makes the question about people’s potential specific enough to act on.
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.
Thinking about what a team could take on as AI changes its work? Tell me which team and which responsibilities, and we can explore the possibilities with Human Machines.
The opportunity goes beyond doing more with less. It includes making people capable of more. That is the possibility I see in IKEA’s reskilling work, and the one I want more leaders to explore.
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.
What could your people become if the old work disappeared?
