Tane Piper: Implementing Content and AI Technologies at IKEA – Episode 5

Tane Piper "Leading-edge technology" may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you walk into an IKEA store, but maybe it should be. IKEA is using AI technologies across its vast collection of businesses to deliver better content experiences to its customers. Tane Piper leads an engineering team at Inter IKEA - the business unit that owns the IKEA brand - that is building their next generation of content and artificial intelligence tooling. We talked about: his role at Inter IKEA the scope of AI activities at IKEA how their knowledge graph provides a "ground reality" for the info they share enterprise uses of AI at IKEA how narrowing the scope of models to your own enterprise improves quality and reduces costs the importance of testing implementations of AI technology how their knowledge graph helps connect content across the enterprise - and offers new content metrics and analytics benefits how their systems facilitate content discovery and reuse how he uses ChatGPT to accelerate his business research his thoughts on AI technologies can add a qualitative dimension to content metrics how AI and machine learning practices may reduce the amount of data that enterprises need to collect and store how they are developing prompt engineering skills at IKEA the importance of taking a pragmatic approach to AI adoption Tane's bio Tane Piper is a self-taught software developer with over 22 years of experience. He has worked across a diverse set of environments, from startups and creative agencies to his current role as a Software Engineering Leader at IKEA. Here, Tane focuses on projects that blend content strategy, knowledge graphs, and artificial intelligence. His approach to leadership is centered on teamwork, innovation, and nurturing growth within his team. He enjoys experimenting with a wide range of technologies. He is involved in the open-source community, releasing various libraries over the year, and writing technical articles sharing his findings. When not engaged in software development, Tane can often be found in his garden, a hobby that provides him with a peaceful counterbalance to his professional life. Alongside his wife, he is also dedicated to the ethical breeding of Polish Hunting Spaniels, reflecting their shared passion for animal welfare. Connect with Tane online LInkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/9qX8fUpWFgQ Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 5. When you think of the iconic furniture retailer IKEA, leading-edge technology may not be the first thing that pops into your mind. But it should. Like most enterprises now, IKEA is exploring the many ways that LLMs, machine learning, knowledge graphs, and other AI technologies can help them sell more furniture and understand their business better. Tane Piper leads an engineering team at IKEA that is building their next generation of content and artificial intelligence tooling. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 5 of the Content + AI podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show Tane Piper. Tane is a software engineering leader at Inter IKEA. And that's the first thing I want to ask you about Tane, is IKEA is this big sprawling complex organization. Tell me about Inter IKEA and how that fits in with the overall IKEA brand. Tane: Yeah. Thanks, Larry. So Inter IKEA, as many people know, you go to IKEA, you go to a shop, but what a lot of people don't know is it is actually a franchise system. So, Inter IKEA is the owner of the IKEA concept, so it owns the furniture side, the range we call it, the supply, and also the retail concept, which is where I work. So we come up with the ideas behind IKEA, how the store works, what the concept is when you go to an IKEA store, this kind of Swedishness of it all. And when you as a customer go to the store,