Will AI take away people's jobs, or will it change the job itself?

Will AI take people's jobs? Maybe we're asking the wrong question.

IKEA has a story that has recently resurfaced.

When the company's AI assistant, Billie, began handling millions of customer requests, a significant portion of the work done by approximately 8,500 customer service employees was automated.

Up to this point, the story is familiar.

*AI income.

*Productivity increases.

*Costs will decrease.

*The population decreases.

But IKEA did something else.

Instead of reducing the number of people, he started changing the work they were doing.

It shifted customer service representatives to higher-value areas such as remote interior design, digital sales, relationship management, and solving complex customer problems.

I believe one of the most important debates in the AI transformation begins right here.

Because AI being able to do the work that humans do is not the same as humans becoming worthless.

On the contrary.

When AI takes over low-value tasks, the organization gains a new and highly valuable resource:

Human capacity.

And from now on, it's not about technology.

Strategy.

There are limits to reducing costs. There are no limits to creating value.

A company can use AI to do existing work with fewer people.

This is efficiency.

But what if that same company can leverage the potential unlocked by AI to create better customer experiences, new services, innovation, and revenue?

This is no longer efficiency.

It is transformation.

Therefore, the question leaders should ask in the coming period is:

"With AI, how many fewer people will we need?"

not.

It should be this:

"What new value can we create with the human potential unleashed by AI?"

The future of AI will be determined as much by the answers leaders give to this question as by algorithms themselves.

I would have made the last sentence even more impactful:

The winners of the AI era won't be the companies that remove the most humans from work. They will be the companies that remove the least valuable work from humans.

In Turkish:

The winners of the AI age will not be the companies that lay off the most people, but those that remove the least valuable tasks from human resources.