"When companies start experiments, they don't have an end goal in mind. They're not designing the business case end to end, and therefore they're stuck in this experimenting mode, which definitely doesn't bring any value."
Eduard Malets, Director, EPAM Systems
Five conversations into the run-up to Streaming Made Easy Live and this is the first one I’ve dedicated entirely to AI. Eduard Malets is a Head of Media & Entertainment at EPAM Systems, 62,000 people across 55 countries, doing AI transformation work with their clients. We opened with a client story.
A UK client was quoted nine man-months to build its iOS app. Ed’s team did it with OpenAI’s Codex in about a month plus six weeks tailoring. Then the app sat there because the client’s marketing cycle wasn’t ready to release it. The rest of the organisation was simply not built to absorb the speed.
According to EPAM’s own research, over 70% of enterprises are experimenting with AI, fewer than 20% have it running across more than two core functions. Ed has four reasons for the mismatch and none of them is the model.
Which is why he’d point an AI programme at the legacy stack first and foremost. The business logic and the requirements are already sitting in that code, it's just old.
We also get into metadata as the media use case that’s ready today, why personalisation has no business case at frontier model prices, what Gamescom taught him about audiences and AI-generated content, the three groups he sorts every company into, and what happened when EPAM put 550 of its own salespeople through a bootcamp.
Paul McCormick from EPAM will demonstrate how to use synthetic personas to conduct customer research at scale on September 10th. If you're defending a research budget this year, that's your session.
Watch our full conversation 👇🏻
That’s it for today but before you go.
Speaking of AI, we have a last minute addition to our program and not any addition: Jamie Barrar, Senior Product Manager at Google who will demo live the storytelling capabilities with Google Flow. Jamie joins a stellar line up of industry OGs, meet them all below:
The last 15 spots are available at this link with readers of SME getting 15% off on all passes. Hope to see you on the 10th!