Artificial intelligence is reshaping jobs rather than eliminating them, and IKEA offers a compelling case study in how companies can deploy AI while investing in their workforce.

Five years ago, IKEA launched Billie, an AI-powered customer service bot that now handles queries for approximately three-quarters of customers who interact with it. Rather than laying off the call-center employees whose responsibilities the bot partially absorbed, IKEA chose to retrain them—shifting staff from routine order and return inquiries into roles as interior design advisors who could guide customers through complex furnishing and purchasing decisions. The decision has paid off: those same call centers have become the retailer's fastest-growing sales channel over the past three years, posting annual year-on-year growth of between 15% and 20%.

The IKEA example stands in contrast to earlier predictions of an AI-driven jobs crisis. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei both forecast significant job displacement from AI—predictions they have since scaled back. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now anticipates net job growth and what he has described as an "AI future for everyone". Others, including Vinod Khosla and Elon Musk, have predicted that people will no longer need money or jobs, though the mechanism for such a transformation remains unspecified.

The retraining strategy is a theme gaining traction among corporate leaders. Major employers have made public commitments to large-scale upskilling: Amazon's Upskilling 2025 program pledges free skills training to hundreds of thousands of employees, and PwC launched a multi-billion-dollar global initiative to retrain its workforce for an AI-augmented workplace. At a recent dinner for CFOs co-hosted with IBM, it became evident that finance executives—despite operating in volatile economic conditions where reducing headcount might seem advantageous—view AI primarily as a driver of productivity, growth, and employee engagement. The principal challenge these leaders identified is encouraging broader adoption of AI tools among colleagues and overcoming the fear that the technology will eventually replace them.

The World Economic Forum estimates that 92 million jobs globally could be displaced by AI, related technologies, and demographic shifts by 2030. However, the WEF also projects that approximately 170 million new roles could be created if employers invest in upskilling workers to deploy AI effectively—a net positive that hinges on precisely the kind of employer-led retraining that IKEA's results demonstrate.

As Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has noted, AI is ultimately another technology tool—what sets it apart is the speed at which it is driving change. Cases like IKEA, supported by concrete growth figures, illustrate how AI can deliver measurable benefits for both businesses and their employees. Whether the approach of redirecting human labor toward higher-value, relationship-driven work can be replicated at scale across other sectors remains a central question for executives and workforce planners navigating the transition.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com. Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com.