AI Literacy Keeps Staff Future Ready

EPAM Systems: 2025 BEST Award Winner, #11

Newtown, Pennsylvania

3-Time Winner

In the high-disruption technology industry, EPAM Systems's dedication to talent development ensures that it not only copes, but thrives, amid technological advances. "The focus on continuously refining and enhancing our learning ecosystem ensures that employees gain business-critical skills tailored to their roles, driving innovation and efficiency across the organization," says Larry Solomon, senior vice president and chief people officer.

EPAM Systems is a technology consultancy with more than 53,000 employees in 55 countries and regions around the world. The company helps its clients reimagine their businesses through a digital lens, combining its software engineering heritage with strategic consulting skills to drive measurable results.

To maximize TD's strategic value, the organization embeds TD staff within each of its strategic programs. For example, the Company Transformation Force (CTF) program accelerates the organization's plan to become a top five global leader in digital business and technology transformation services and solutions. The program comprises eight major change initiatives to future-proof the company, and each one has an executive champion and embedded TD professionals.

Within the CTF program, executives and TD staff work together to identify where learning, upskilling, and development can bring the most value. Then, as they develop learning initiatives to address those opportunities, they collaborate on identifying key performance indicators for every learning program. That directly ties TD to business results, such as revenue growth, innovation, customer satisfaction, and market leadership.

Some of the most exciting work TD has carried out as part of the CTF program supports the company objective to become an artificial-intelligence-native organization. That effort has required the TD function to look both at how it manages its own operations and how the company as a whole should evolve alongside AI.

The TD team has integrated the business's proprietary AI model into its operations, feeding it information from a massive data lake to gain real-time insights into the company's workforce. As a result, "AI is a key enabler in our effort to keep our employees future ready," states Solomon. "It acts not just as a tool, but as a collaborative partner that personalizes learning paths for each individual."

The TD team has also taken a leadership role in spreading AI awareness and literacy across the organization, partnering with internal technical experts to create a comprehensive three-level AI learning program that addresses the needs of different roles across the company. The first level ensures foundational AI literacy for all employees. The second level offers role-based courses to help staff use AI in their daily tasks. And the third level provides specialized learning paths for engineers to build AI-driven solutions and for consultants to present and sell those solutions to clients.

All the program's levels have shown impressive results. Almost every employee has taken the first-level AI literacy course, the vast majority have begun integrating AI into their daily work, and the company's AI-related business has grown substantially.

View the entire list of 2025 BEST Award winners.