Coursera helps Maxis accelerate enterprise AI fluency and adoption
- Industry:
Telecommunications
- Location:
Malaysia
- Size:
3000 employees
- Topics:
AI Transformation, Workforce Development, Leadership Development, Digital Skills, Learning Culture
OVERVIEW
As one of Malaysia's leading telecommunications providers, Maxis employs around 3000 people across the business. When major industry changes reshaped Malaysia's telecommunications market, Maxis recognized that maintaining its competitive advantage required more than technology investment. The company needed to instill the right culture and rapidly build AI capability across every business function while strengthening leadership, innovation, and workforce readiness.
Working with Coursera, Maxis reimagined its learning strategy from a traditional, pull-based model into an enterprise capability engine. AI, digital skills, leadership development, and role-based learning pathways became embedded within the company's broader talent strategy. This helped employees build the competencies needed to support business transformation and future growth.
“Coursera access was strategically deployed to add diversity to our learning ecosystem and to help us accelerate building the learning muscle at Maxis”
—Saurabh (Pixie) Jaggi, Head of Culture, Learning and Talent Development
THE CHALLENGE
The market disruption exposed significant organizational capability gaps. These challenges came at a moment when major shifts in Malaysia's telecommunications market were raising the stakes for building a future-ready workforce.
Leadership identified the opportunity to significantly drive higher learner engagement, consistency in technical capability, AI adoption, and structured development aligned with business priorities. For a company of Maxis's size, realizing these objectives meant rethinking how learning connected to everyday business priorities. Existing learning programs encouraged optional participation but failed to build the capabilities needed to support AI-enabled operations and changing customer expectations.
Maxis needed a scalable model that could accelerate AI adoption across technical and nontechnical functions. The model also needed to connect learning directly to leadership development, operational performance, and innovation.
THE SOLUTION
Maxis introduced a core curriculum to build capability at all levels and supplemented that with embedding Coursera at the center of its enterprise learning architecture. This approach connected learning directly to the business challenges outlined above, rather than treating training as a separate function.
The company developed personalized AI pathways for business users, technical professionals, practitioners, and executive leaders. These pathways integrated learning into three strategic talent pillars: strengthening core capabilities, developing digitally savvy intrapreneurs, and preparing future leaders. Each pillar targeted a distinct part of the workforce, so the learning strategy reached technical teams and senior decision-makers alike.
Maxis used Coursera Program Builder, curated learning pathways, Professional Certificates, AI Coach, Course Builder, and Credly badges to support this work. Expert content from DeepLearning.AI, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, Microsoft, and other industry leaders enabled employees to build practical AI capabilities aligned with their roles.
Rather than asking employees to search a broad catalog, Maxis created highly targeted learning journeys. These included AI for Engineering, AI for Sales, AI for Software Development, and AI for Human Resources. This targeted approach made it easier for employees to find learning that matched their day-to-day responsibilities. Executive sponsorship, AI First Day events, Coursera Clinics, and recognition programs reinforced learning as a strategic business priority. Manager accountability helped make it a core expectation, not an optional activity. This combination of leadership visibility and accountability helped shift learning from a nice-to-have into a shared expectation across the company.
THE RESULTS
Maxis successfully translated learning into enterprise transformation.
The most visible outcome was AI adoption. Weekly active use of generative AI increased by nearly 3x At the same time, certifications in core generative AI skills increased by 40%. Intermediate and advanced AI mastery grew by 42%, showing employees progressing beyond basic awareness into practical capability.
Learning also resulted in measurable operational innovation. Engineers applied Coursera-acquired skills to develop AI-powered anomaly detection systems and event correlation engines. They also built automated operational reporting, optimized data pipelines, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions, localized large language model integrations, and multi-cloud AI architectures. These solutions expanded operational visibility, automated repetitive work, accelerated decision-making, and reduced reliance on external vendors.
Beyond technical teams, employees across the organization translated Coursera learning into business improvement initiatives through the Values in Action (VIA) challenge. Critical thinking, lean methodologies, and AI skills helped generate structured innovation proposals. These proposals contributed to measurable revenue growth, cost savings, cost avoidance, and customer experience improvements. The initiative doubled organizational ideation while tripling realized business value.
Today, AI capability is embedded across every business function rather than concentrated within technical teams. By aligning Coursera directly to business strategy, leadership development, and operational execution, Maxis has established a sustainable learning model that strengthens competitiveness in an AI-first market.
Saurabh (Pixie) Jaggi
Head of Culture, Learning and Talent Development
“Having in-house engineers rapidly adopted advanced capabilities… reduced external vendor dependence and further strengthened the innovation-driven culture that defines Maxis”