IKEA's New AI Assistant Aims to Help You Design Any Room In Your Personal Style

IKEA just launched a brand-new AI assistant, and it's ready to help you with all of your home design needs.

This isn’t the first time the Swedish retailer has dabbled in AI technology—last summer, IKEA launched an AI assistant on its website that's designed to help customers plan the layout of their furniture. But this new assistant, named IKEA Kreativ, is a more custom version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Basically, it’s the IKEA version of generative AI. This means it can give you a more in-depth, personalized experience—almost as if you were working with an interior designer in person.

Customers can use this new assistant when browsing IKEA’s extensive furniture collection. If you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for, ask the assistant to give you recommendations based on the aesthetic or design style you’re going for. It'll even help you shop by store, so you can find the products you’re looking for near you.

The AI uses IKEA furniture when generating design inspiration images for you. If you tell it to give you an image of a cozy, neutral kitchen, it shows you how certain products fit into the aesthetic. One of the most daunting parts about shopping for new furniture is figuring out how it fits with your current pieces, and this tool solves that: If you want to know how IKEA shelving looks against emerald-green walls, for example, all you have to do is ask to see it.

How to Use IKEA's New AI Tool

The AI is relatively intuitive to use and functions exactly like ChatGPT. To get started, you ask it any question you have about IKEA’s furniture catalog.

To get the most out of the assistant, be as specific as possible—when searching for a particular item, include your price range, colors, and sizing. Using adjectives like "cozy," "modern," "chic," and other design descriptors also helps the AI understand exactly what you’re going for. 

The assistant delivers you a short list of products that matches your description, providing a price, reviewer rating, an image, and why it thinks the products fit what you want. Then, it generates an AI image using one of the pieces to show what it could look like in a decorated space.

These created images aren’t perfect—like most AI tools, the IKEA assistant depicts a very idealized version of a room—but they’re more focused on realism than other image generators. IKEA's furniture pieces themselves are generally to scale, so you can get a practical idea of what they might look like in real life (even if it does sometimes get confused about colors).

IKEA hopes to continue expanding the assistant's functionality: The ultimate goal is to make design aide more accessible to everyone. Using AI costs much less than hiring an interior designer to take a look at your space. That’s what the retailer is all about, after all—in addition, it's working on lowering prices throughout the year to ensure anyone can shop there.

To access IKEA’s brand-new AI assistant, head over to OpenAI’s GPT store, and select the IKEA Assistant to talk to. You need a ChatGPT subscription to access, but the IKEA assistant doesn’t come at any additional cost.