Engineering the Future: Staying at the Forefront of AI Innovation
The rise of AI has inevitably pushed companies into yet another technological revolution and, consequently, a race to the forefront of innovation. It’s akin to the gold-rush mentality with a promised nirvana of cost savings, increased productivity, improved customer experiences and innovation at speed for competitive advantage. It almost feels too good to be true. And we all know what that means — it usually is too good to be true.
So, how do enterprises prepare to adopt AI at scale? What can they do to be AI ready?
Most companies today commission proofs of concept (POCs) to test how the various workloads, systems and technologies could work to their advantage. In some cases, they work with technology partners to coinvest in these POCs to test, learn and invest at scale. Initially, these projects start off great, the tests are completed, the learnings are documented and everyone gets excited for what’s next.
However, when it comes to investing in and scaling AI, most organizations find themselves in paralysis. And it’s no wonder — with so many POCs on the table at the same time, prioritization, investment and scaling are not easily achieved with the same vim, vigor and speed that’s necessary. Why? Because there is a lack of people with the most critical AI skills — enterprises either need to skill up or outsource to get projects off the ground.
Our clients often ask, “So, how does a company like EPAM prepare their workforce for AI?” The answer is simple. While masterclasses and hackathons have been de rigueur in recent years across the enterprise landscape, we’ve put a twist on these concepts to create a new way for our workforce to stay at the cutting edge of innovation to help solve our customers more complex problems with our AI Games series.
In June, EPAM launched its inaugural AI Games — a three-day, multifaceted educational program designed to integrate AI not only into our own work, but also to build into our work with clients. The AI Games series featured technical masterclasses, workshops, hackathons, games and courses designed to help our teams build and hone technical skills in a hands-on environment and provide exposure to test emerging technologies, encourage our engineers to think outside of the box to innovate, and work in teams to improve communication and collaboration to solve some of the most complex challenges we see with our clients.
Arkadiy Dobkin, our CEO and President, opened the AI Games by emphasizing the importance of AI for the future of business and technology transformations. He stressed the critical need for robust employee education and widespread adoption to successfully implement AI into our workflow.
“Without artificial intelligence technologies, we simply cannot move forward. It is an essential component of the future for our clients and for us," he said.
He also highlighted how the integration of AI across all business sectors has significantly accelerated over the past two years, positively impacting the quality of our services, which use AI technologies and this, in turn, driving new opportunities.
He noted, "Today, we see that we have more than 19,000 unique learners of AI. And we are ready to support each employee in improving their skills in this area. We hope that by the end of 2024, the majority of EPAM employees will possess fundamental AI skills, with 15-20% being advanced users.”
All in all, over 14,000 EPAM employees participated in the AI Games activities including 990 hackathon participants representing 220 independent teams tasked with solving various business challenges. Roughly 3,000 people participated in the masterclasses offered through the program and just under 2,000 employees played the AI Games with 6,000 completing the AI-focused classes that were offered.
The organizers of the EPAM AI Games are thrilled with the year-one results and are eager to incorporate the ideas into various projects and parts of our business to ensure that we have the right skills to support our employees and clients with scaling their AI ambitions.
Eli Feldman, EPAM’s Chief Technology Officer noted, “The AI Games Hackathon attracted a record level of participants organized in over 200 teams. Not only did these teams come up with awesome solutions, but they also relied on and stress-tested our DIAL-based AI infrastructure and our AI-enabled development tools like Leap, CodeMie and EliteA™, which all proved to be more than capable supporting large scale, high pace development teams.”
Feldman also shared that, “Teaching AI with AI is part of our mindset that meaningful AI transformation can only be enabled by making the transformation process itself AI-native. At AI Games, we have used AI-native learning to create rapid feedback loops between the learners and the AI skills they need learn.”
We think it’s safe to say that there can be fun in learning.
