How IKEA pushes new retail software across diverse global markets

This article summarizes an episode of Amplify’s video series featuring Burce Gültekin, head of data and AI at IKEA.

Burce Gültekin, head of data and AI at IKEA/ Photo credit: Burce Gültekin

Corporate software purchases often fail when boardroom visions collide with daily retail realities.

Burce Gültekin, head of data and AI at IKEA, counters this disconnect by insisting that digital strategy must start on the store floor.

Her framework requires that tech adoption solves actual worker bottlenecks, navigates global compliance with unified ethics, and anticipates an automated coding landscape that redefines human talent development.

Growth begins when a process breaks

Translating high-level objectives into practical growth requires leaders to observe actual workflows and identify operational friction before building a scalable methodology anchored in several field-tested practices:

• Start with clear goals: Connect the plan to plain objectives like increasing visits and answering shopper questions faster.
• Watch the work before picking the tool: The AI chief asks workers how they execute their jobs today and what slows them down.
• Find out what frustrates people at the register: A customer bringing a printed picture of a television stand forces the worker to waste time matching the image to a product number.
• Use new tools only to remove a slow step: Visual search software translates a customer image into matching products, removing manual guesswork.
• Test with a diverse mix of people: The company validates ideas across three countries before expanding.
• Write down what works in a guide: Documenting local lessons into a repeatable method stops the organization from pretending every market operates identically.
• Send leaders to the front line: Office staff regularly work in stores to experience the daily pressure directly.

Slow learning prevents useless tools by highlighting the danger of executives rushing to install systems everywhere at once. Pushing software across hundreds of stores causes widespread confusion and wastes resources.

“It is a bit of hard work and slowing down at the beginning, but then it helps you to accelerate because the AI work is actually solving real problems,” Gültekin notes.

China shows the way forward

Requiring proof that software solves real problems proves vital because shopping behaviors and digital infrastructure vary wildly across borders.

“The pace of change in Asia, in China, versus the pace of change in Europe is different,” Gültekin observes.

Teams in China operate at a rapid pace, serving customers who expect immediate digital results, while European markets prefer measured rollouts and established routines.

A global business struggles when it forces one strict timeline on everyone. This approach prompts the retailer to let fast-moving regions test ideas and harvest lessons for the rest of the world.

Giving different countries the freedom to experiment enables the main office to evaluate local successes for broader global deployment, avoiding rigid conformity.

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