Building Your GenAI Dream Team 

So the decision has been made to upgrade your business using generative AI technology. Great! But now comes the hard part: Figuring out how to transform that aspiration into action, and it all starts with people.

The first move you’ll make in your GenAI journey is assembling the group of folks who will design, build, test, and deploy your GenAI applications. While these projects often involve automating work done by humans, GenAI development is very much a people-centric journey.

Technical roles are critical in GenAI application development. Depending on whether you’re building your own AI model (unlikely), fine-tuning an existing model (a little more likely), or adopting a pre-built AI model with prompt engineering and RAG (most likely), your GenAI team will demand a mix of data scientists, AI engineers, data engineers, and application developers.

But GenAI is not the exclusive domain of the techies. In fact, compared to classical machine learning projects, the role played by non-technical practitioners is even greater.

Non-Technical Roles

You won’t get far without the necessary technical expertise in GenAI. However, when using GenAI to modify core company functions, you’ll need the input from line-of-business experts, such as the head of customer support or the director of warehouse management, to ensure that your GenAI product is a good match to how they see customers and employees interacting with your brand.

If your GenAI targets any critical outward-facing functions, such as customer service, you’ll need input from high-level executives, if not the board of directors itself, to ensure that the company’s values are being upheld and you’re not doing anything to embarrass it. Similarly, if any security or ethical concerns arise in a GenAI project, that’s not something you can leave to the Web developer or data engineer; you’ll need the expertise of a security professional or a trained ethicist.

The good news is that you don’t have to hire all of these folks yourself. You can tap outside experts or tech consultants to help you build out your team. These consulting firms can provide much of the technical expertise that’s required, and depending on the size of the project, they may even be able to serve as the project manager to keep everything running smoothly.

One of the consulting firms that’s helping clients to build GenAI solutions is EPAM Solutions. The Newtown, Pennsylvania-based company employs more than 50,000 people around the world and is rapidly expanding its GenAI services team.

EPAM’s Rule of Three

EPAM uses a rule of three in constructing GenAI teams, says Pierre Samec, the company’s SVP of Enterprise AI Solutions. The teams are built out following a general rule:

“One is a product manager or business leader who decides what is the prioritization of the backlog,” he says. “One is a subject matter expert. And subject matter expertise is really fundamental in the GenAI space because if you don’t speak the language, it doesn’t work.

“The third role is what we call a GenAI builder, which is this person who can do prompt engineering but is also a full-stack engineer who can go fetch the data, fetch the APIs, fetch the services,” Semec says.

That triumvirate forms the core team of people, or the pod, that EPAM uses in GenAI client engagements. That doesn’t include outside expertise, such as security and ethics, which Semec views as horizontal structures within each organization.

Read the full article here.

Learn more about how EPAM helps drive AI strategy, delivery and enablement here.