Imagining Furniture (and the Future) With AI: IKEA Retail’s Barbara Martin Coppola

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Words matter, in particular, the words we use to describe technology within an organization matter. While IKEA product names may be hard to pronounce, the retailer is crystal clear about how it talks about technology. Today we talk with Barbara Martin Coppola, the Chief Digital Officer at IKEA Retail, about indirect benefits from artificial intelligence.
Welcome to Me, Myself and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:45)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:15)
Today we're talking with Barbara Martin Coppola. She's Chief Digital Officer for IKEA. Barbara, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

**Barbara Martin Coppola** (1:22)
Thank you for having me.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:24)
The title of our podcast is Me, Myself and AI. So we tend to focus on the individual and the individual story behind technology.
Let's start there. Can you describe your current role at IKEA?

**Barbara Martin Coppola** (1:36)
Chief Digital Officer at IKEA Retailer, which is the world's largest furnishing retailer with 367 stores in 30 plus markets. And my role really is I'm responsible for the overall digital development business for the company as well as the digital transformation.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:56)
You've got a pretty significant background, I think roles at Google and YouTube and Samsung, Texas Instruments and then school in Spain and France. Can you connect things you've learned in some of those past roles to how you've applied them to your current role?

**Barbara Martin Coppola** (2:13)
I have worked now in four different industries, in semiconductors, then I went to consumer electronics, pure digital and now I'm in retail. And in all those places, digital technology played a very, very important part. I'm connecting the dots between everything that I've learned in the past and both in business models, in different ways of organizing companies, different cultures and leadership as well to lead the company towards modernization, digitalization and different business models. My time at Google, for instance, taught me what performance is.
And what I mean by that is how to use agility iterations and measured outcomes of projects at Samsung, which to me was the best example of execution I've seen in my life. I was based in South Korea, and somehow I see the power of the collective.
And so how does it translate now to the environment at IKEA? Once the consensus is reached, then how to be clear about, okay, now we've got the decision, we go. I can go on and on, but at the end of the day, I think is adapting to the different cultural norms and trying to bring from other places and actually augment it for the benefit of the company and the well-being of people and the reward that it can be to achieve things together.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:47)
It's great. Barbara, how does AI fit into the overall digital roadmap?

**Barbara Martin Coppola** (3:54)
AI is absolutely core, essential.
I really believe that data is the most important asset the company has today. AI is being applied pretty much every step of the way in the value chain of retailing. It has potential for pretty much everything. And so it's a choice of focus and it's a choice of business outcomes. And where do we put the data scientists to be creating magic really?
We focus the creation of AI towards different values or outcome. That plus the appetite of the company to create amazing things, knowing how AI can be a magic wand if we want it to be, then the belief of the company that this is a key component for the success and competitivity of the company matters a whole lot as well.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:47)
So is there a particular project that you can give us some details on that you're excited about that's happened recently or that your team has been involved with?

**Barbara Martin Coppola** (4:54)
There's one actually that I love personally.
It's about democratizing design. What do I mean by that? You know, this feeling where you want to decorate something as beautiful as what you have seen in the store, but you don't know where to start. And so what we have done is just with the comfort of your mobile phone, you can scan your room, take pictures all the way, and then through Visual.AI, we actually give you back a picture where you can move the furniture. You can delete it and you can actually fit in 3D models of IKEA furniture that adapt to the size of your space. So imagine how powerful that is.