Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs
2026 Regional Winner | AI Pioneer
Industry
Technology
Company HQ
Gurugram, India
Number of Employees
1,200+
How Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs built an AI-first engineering culture with Udemy
Business outcomes
1,073
Active learners (78.7% adoption)
2,763
AI courses accessed
37%
Improvement in engineering productivity
Challenge
Scaling through capability, not headcount
Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs builds digital products that change how the world connects, pays, shops, and unwinds. Headquartered in Gurugram, India, with offices in Bengaluru and a workforce distributed across eight countries, the company delivers end-to-end digital product engineering for Deutsche Telekom and its global partners.
As AI rapidly transformed software engineering, Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs identified a business challenge rather than simply a learning challenge. Engineers were spending nearly 30 to 40% of their time on repetitive activities such as code generation, documentation, debugging, testing, and knowledge discovery. This reduced engineering velocity, increased delivery costs, and slowed innovation at a time when customer expectations and product complexity were rapidly increasing.
Rather than scaling through headcount, the company chose to scale through capability. The organization needed to shift the conversation from whether AI would replace jobs to how AI could make every engineer more capable, productive, and impactful.
“Our vision was to shift from asking whether AI would replace jobs to asking how AI can make every engineer more capable, and Udemy gave us the learning foundation to do it,” said Khushi Lalwani, HR Business Partner.
“Our vision was to shift from asking whether AI would replace jobs to asking how AI can make every engineer more capable, and Udemy gave us the learning foundation to do it.”
Solution
‘Become an AI hybrid engineer’
Using Udemy as its strategic learning partner, Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs launched the “Become an AI Hybrid Engineer” initiative to democratize AI across the organization.
Udemy provided structured, role-based learning journeys for Backend, Frontend, DevOps, QA, Product, and AI Engineering teams, covering practical skills that engineers could apply immediately to live projects:
• Generative AI: creating content, code, and documentation with AI models
• Prompt Engineering: crafting effective prompts for consistent, high-quality AI outputs
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): building context-aware AI applications that ground responses in enterprise data
• Agentic AI: orchestrating AI agents that execute repetitive implementation work while engineers focus on architecture and customer outcomes
AI-powered features in Udemy accelerated the rollout. AI Assistant reduced the time employees spent searching for relevant learning content, Skills Mapping enabled standardized learning pathways aligned to engineering roles, and Role Play allowed managers to practice coaching and feedback conversations independently.
“Udemy became the foundation of our AI transformation, giving every engineer a structured path from learning to application,” Lalwani said.
“Udemy became the foundation of our AI transformation, giving every engineer a structured path from learning to application.”
Results
37% productivity improvement amid role transformations
More than 1,000 active learners engaged with the initiative, representing 78.7% adoption across the engineering organization. Employees completed more than 24,000 learning hours and accessed more than 2,700 AI courses. AI now supports every stage of the engineering lifecycle, from AI-assisted planning and intelligent code generation to automated documentation, AI-generated testing, and AI-aware deployment pipelines.
The business impact was substantial. Engineering productivity improved by 37%, 30% of Backend and Frontend engineers transitioned into full-stack roles, and 15% moved into AI-focused engineering roles. More than 900 engineers now actively integrate AI into their daily workflows, and the company scaled learning across more than 1,300 employees without proportionally increasing L&D effort.
“Udemy enabled us to build an AI-first engineering culture where learning translates directly into innovation and measurable business impact,” Lalwani said.
“Udemy enabled us to build an AI-first engineering culture where learning translates directly into innovation and measurable business impact.”
Looking Ahead
Deepening integrations
Deutsche Telekom Digital Labs continues to deepen AI integration across the software development lifecycle, with plans to expand role-based learning pathways and explore new AI-assisted development tools.
“As we scale AI-assisted development further, Udemy Business gives us the learning infrastructure to keep our engineers at the forefront of AI innovation,” Lalwani said.
“As we scale AI-assisted development further, Udemy Business gives us the learning infrastructure to keep our engineers at the forefront of AI innovation.”
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