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CTOnews.com, June 13 (Reuters)-Swedish furniture giant Ikea is training call center customer service to become interior design consultants as the company strives to provide more remote home decoration services and basic consulting services through an artificial intelligence robot called Billie.

▲ Picture Source Pexels in April this year, Ikea extended its remote interior design services launched in parts of Europe, Australia and the United Arab Emirates to the UK and the United States. In the UK, customers pay as little as 25 pounds (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 224 yuan) to get a 45-60-minute video call service with interior design suggestions and a list of related product recommendations. For complete design plans such as graphic drawings and 3D effect drawings, customers are required to pay an additional £125( currently about 1119 yuan).

Ingka, Ikea's parent company, said it had trained 8500 call center customer service staff since 2021, while Billie, the AI chat robot launched that year, had handled 47 per cent of customer base inquiries in the past two years.

"We are committed to strengthening the employability of Ingka employees and accelerating the creation of new jobs through lifelong learning, development and retraining," said Ulrika Biesert, Ingka's global human and cultural manager. Asked whether the increase in AI scenarios would lead to layoffs, he replied: "We don't think that's going to happen at the moment."

In fiscal year 2022, remote interior design contributed 1.3 billion euros (currently about 9.997 billion yuan) to Engka, accounting for 3.3% of its total revenue. Ingka hopes to increase that to 10% by 2028. By contrast, Ikea's online sales in fiscal 2022 were about 9.9 billion euros (currently about 76.131 billion yuan), accounting for 25 per cent of Ingka's total revenue.

An analyst in London said Ikea invested a little late in virtual design services compared with its main competitor, US home ecommerce platform Wayfair, and required a lot of investment to ensure that the color, texture and size of the items were accurately reflected.

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