Advanced Info Service (AIS) believes in the culture of learning, which has become ingrained in the corporate character. Also, the company is thinking and doing for people outside of the organisation, through its “Jump Thailand, Thinking for Thais” project.
Starting as “AIS Academy”, the project was born of internal innovation disruption before the valuable experience learned was shared with others. AIS has expanded its collaboration with allies from both the public and private sectors, and now its community has more than 15,000 members.
That is why it was not beyond expectation for AIS to win the prestigious Most Innovative Knowledge Enterprise (MIKE) Award for innovative corporations for the second year in a row in 2021.
As a digital life service provider, AIS has focused on personnel development and sustainable upgrade of the digital infrastructure. The next targeted milestone is to become a cognitive telco, that is a smart organization centered on customer demands — capable of keeping up with changes in customer behaviours, responding to the diverse customer demands quickly and promptly in real time.
For the company, the country’s stable digital infrastructure means a better quality of life for Thais.
AIS believes in innovation and people’s role in creating and making use of innovations for added values — not only in the business aspect, but also about living life. When it comes to people, AIS has the goal of making more than 12,000 of its employees ready to cope with any kind of change in the future and to help upgrade the company into a cognitive telco. Details regarding AIS becoming a cognitive telco will become clearer in early 2022.
Every year, AIS continues to develop tools and helps its employees gain new knowledge and skills necessary to improve their capability so that they can play the role of upgrading Thailand’s digital infrastructure.
Kantima Lerlertyuttitham, chief human resources officer of AIS and Intouch Holdings, says personnel are the key to help organizations achieve their goals.
At AIS, tools are created for all levels of employees to learn new knowledge and skills from inside and outside of the country, on digital platforms like LearnDi of AIS Academy.
AIS encourages employees to learn from mistakes through its “Learning from Falling” project. Successful organizations often avoid risks of failure and become restricted by a shortage of innovations. AIS acquires people with such an experience to serve as important change agents, allowing the corporation to learn from experience.
“To allow learning within the organization, we need to blend the original culture with the new one so that the organization has the DNA required for moving forward,” Kantima said.
“AIS believes that when it is necessary to change the DNA for increased competitiveness, the [corporate] culture needs to be altered so that we can move forward with better potential,” she added.
To progress further, it is not enough to learn within the corporation only, so the AIS Academy for Thais has a key mission of creating a society of learning.
AIS has set up a digital library system for schools on the fringes and in rural areas for better access to knowledge. It is a collaboration with the National Innovation Agency (NIA), the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, and the Embassy of Canada. The digital library can be accessed at any time, from anywhere in the world, and through multiple devices.
It is based on the LearnDi platform, which is an important tool to help users plan their lifelong learning. In a project starting in 2022, learners get micro credentials after completing each of the courses available.
Such work helps AIS to gain recognition in the form of the MIKE Award 2021 obtained from the International Global MIKE Study Group (GMSG), which rates the world’s leading corporations regarding their knowledge management and innovative practices.
AIS is the only telecom organization in Thailand to have won two MIKE Awards — Global MIKE Award 2021 (for the second consecutive year) and MIKE Thailand Gold Award 2021. In the previous year, the company had won the Global MIKE Award in 2020.
“We are pleased and highly honoured to win two awards this year,” Kantima said.
The MIKE Award recognizes enterprises with the best practices to cultivate and convert their knowledge into superior products, services, and solutions. The GMSG works with Hong Kong Polytechnic University in selecting the winners.
This year, AIS has won the MIKE Thailand Gold Award 2021 in the category of Most Innovative Knowledge Enterprise.
Winners of MIKE Awards are selected under an assessment framework based on both quantity and quality factors. The assessment comprises two main parts — the opportunity for employees to constantly increase their knowledge and display their creativity, and the innovations frequently employed in improving products and services or creating new businesses.
Also taken into consideration in selecting the award winners are eight sustainability factors: Empowering knowledge workers for innovation; developing internal and external networks and connectivity; cultivating organizational innovative culture; strategizing, visioning and transformative leadership; investing and delivering knowledge-based products, services and solutions; enforcing knowledge practices and systems for knowledge creation; implementing creative and virtual space to create stakeholder value; and creating client and user expectations, need and experiences.
“The criteria for selecting the MIKE Award winners can confirm that AIS’s guidelines regarding human resource management are in the right path and universally acceptable,” Kantima concludes.
