To slash waste, Ikea looks to artificial intelligence

It's part of Ikea's larger push to reduce its carbon footprint. Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka Group (the company that oversees Ikea's retail outposts), has expressed a commitment to making the company "climate positive" by the end of the decade; the company has allocated roughly $223 million to the initiative and has pledged to invent more energy-efficient alternatives for some of its most popular products. Waste poses a particularly tricky problem. Once a product leaves an Ikea store, the company doesn't have much control over whether it gets returned, passed on to some college kids, or ends up in a landfill. So Ikea is trying to prevent waste in the first place.