MAIA coaches micro and small businesses and smallholder farmers over WhatsApp. Domain expertise + behavioral change = higher sales and lower costs. Co-developed with local experts, independently evaluated, constantly improving.
An independent evaluation commissioned by the ILO measured business practices among Colombian coffee farmers using MAIA, at baseline and endline. Formal business registration rose from 2% to 17% of surveyed farmers, and 55% reported directly implementing changes MAIA recommended. Pre-post results, reported with full methodology and sample sizes on the results page.
Training and consulting for small firms is two of IPA's 14 "Best Bets" for improving the lives of people in poverty. But traditional programs teach 20 to 30 business practices and entrepreneurs implement only one or two. The constraint is not knowledge. It is implementation.
Human coaching closes that gap, but at hundreds of dollars per participant it cannot reach the hundreds of millions of small business owners who need it. MAIA delivers continuous coaching at an at-scale variable cost of cents per user per month, free for the entrepreneur.
MAIA is not a generic Q&A chatbot. It is built and run with the people who know each context: ministry programs, training institutions, agronomists and trainers whose curricula and judgment shape what MAIA teaches. Country-specific knowledge bases help ground its coaching in the rules and realities entrepreneurs actually face.
Between conversations, MAIA works in the background: it maintains a business diagnostic and coaching profile for every user, decides which coaching move comes next, and follows up to see what happened.
In the background, MAIA maintains a living profile of each enterprise and an eight-pillar business diagnostic built on leading training programmes like the ILO's SIYB.
Each week MAIA chooses a coaching move for that specific business, drawn from local curricula, regulations, and partner training materials.
The entrepreneur gets a concrete plan plus ready-to-use assets: signs, price calculations, templates, checklists.
MAIA follows up within 24 hours, while results are fresh, and updates the diagnostic so next week builds on what worked.
Algo mejor — he empezado a recibir visitas a mi rincóncito cultural y han comprado los accesorios, o sea que sí funcionó.
Le mandé el mensaje y ya me dio un cronograma hasta agosto. Excelente. Adoro a Maya, esta inteligencia artificial que me ayuda un montón.
Increíble, hace 2 meses empecé a hacerte preguntas y hoy ya estoy a un solo paso de mostrarle al mundo una empresa que quiere innovar el mundo.
Verbatim messages from MAIA conversations, as published in our monthly partner reports. Attributed by business type and place only, to protect users' privacy.
Following the ILO's LABOR social-innovation methodology, MAIA is co-created with the institutions entrepreneurs already trust, whose training materials and field experience shape its knowledge base.
Through the ILO's SIYB programme, MAIA's engine also powers SABY, an AI coach for graduates of one of the world's largest entrepreneurship training programs.
MAIA is not a finished product. Every conversation feeds a data flywheel: pre-registered randomized experiments test coaching designs head to head, and an evaluation pipeline informed by the staged approach of the Center for Global Development and The Agency Fund tracks engagement, retention, and financial impact.
We are also building REX, a behavioral measure that detects in the conversations themselves whether users actually execute what their coach proposes, validated against survey outcomes. What works ships. What doesn't gets documented.
Prompts, architecture, evaluation results, and lessons from two and a half years of live coaching, all on the blog and all dedicated to the public domain under CC0. We want to be copied.
We work with ministries, development organizations, and researchers. Tell us your country, your program, and roughly how many entrepreneurs you serve.
Write to Bailey Klinger, project lead
