EPAM is a U.S.-headquartered, global leading digital transformation services, product engineering, and integrated strategy, experience, and technology consulting partner. Pulse 2.0 interviewed EPAM’s Head of M&E Consulting in North America, Dave Liu, to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Dave Liu’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Liu said:
“While I’ve only been with EPAM for three years, my career in the Media and Entertainment (M&E) space spans almost two decades. I began my journey at NBCUniversal (when it was owned by GE), where I participated in GE’s Information Management Leadership Program. This two-year rotational program allowed me to explore and contribute to various parts of NBCU’s business.”
“During my time at NBCU, I launched a startup focused on digital advertisement spot distribution, from defining the business case through to product development and go-to-market activities. Additionally, during the program I had purview across NBCU’s broadcast and studio media supply chain operations and tools from content planning and production to distribution and end user experiences. I also helped lead various digital transformation initiatives across News, Advanced Media Platforms, Content Operations, and even a Lean Six Sigma program for their entire IT organization.”
“I eventually transitioned into consulting to broaden my horizons beyond NBCU and joined Cognizant’s M&E practice and OnPrem Solution Partners, a boutique M&E consulting firm. Through my time in consulting, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with major content providers like Disney, Univision, Warner Bro Discovery, Fox and others. My consulting work also extended into gaming, sports, music and even other industries like automotive and retail/CPG.”
“I lead our Media and Entertainment consulting practice in North America. Essentially, I work with clients in the M&E space, whether they’re content providers, live entertainment, sports or the hardware and software vendors that support the industry. We partner with them and work on leading-edge projects to help them innovate in their respective space. Specifically, we focus on four main pillars: cost optimization, revenue optimization, media supply chain and data intelligence.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for EPAM so far? Liu reflected:
“One of my favorite memories from working here at EPAM was just recently presenting a proposal to a prospective client in the sports industry.”
“During our conversation, we referenced a past project with a major airline, and to our surprise, the VP shared he had been with the company at the time. He had a fantastic reaction, saying, “I didn’t realize you were the team behind Continuum.” He took several minutes to enthusiastically share with his colleagues, including the Chief Strategy Development Officer, just how impactful and enduring our work with the airline had been. He described it as some of the most meaningful work he’s been part of in his career, emphasizing how our approach to bringing ideas to life not only delivered strong outcomes but also ‘made it easy for leadership to know what to say yes to.’”
“His sentiment aligned perfectly with the project’s objectives, and the VP also pointed out several parallels between the transformation his current organization is aiming to achieve and the change we had helped drive at the airline. To top it off, when we brought up the option of providing client references, he offered to serve as one himself, sharing that he had firsthand experience working with us and could personally speak to the caliber of our work.”
“I’ve never seen that level of enthusiasm towards the work a consulting firm has done before. This endorsement was incredibly validating and energizing, and a remarkable testament to the impact EPAM has had across multiple industries.”
Core Services
What are the core services of your department? Liu explained:
“We offer end-to-end solutions for the M&E industry, covering everything from upfront strategy and solution evaluation to implementation and ongoing support. We try to simplify things for our clients, rather than having these giant, overwhelming up-sell menus of “Here’s all the different things that we do!” As I mentioned earlier, our M&E work focuses on our clients’ typical challenges: cost optimization, revenue optimization, media supply chain, and data intelligence.
— Revenue Optimization: Also known as revenue operations, this solution includes everything from intelligent churn prediction, customer retention, and driving sustainable revenue growth, to building next-gen experiences – whether that includes augmented reality, virtual reality, hyper-accurate microlocation, blockchain, or more.
— Data Intelligence: Today, every system is chugging out massive volumes of data, with artificial intelligence (AI) increasing that output enormously. Making smart, automated business decisions depends on a strong data foundation. As such, our customers need to understand their data sources, establish sources of truth, ensure data quality, and then leverage that data foundation for advanced use cases like predictive and generative AI (GenAI). Ultimately, we help our clients build both the infrastructure and the roadmap for scalable data products.
— Media Supply Chain: This is at the heart of what we do for M&E. It spans the full content lifecycle, from content creation and management to distribution, powered by the right people, processes, and tools. Our expertise and strategic acquisitions serve as accelerators that empower our clients to get their quality content to market faster.
— Cost Reduction: Reducing spend, avoiding unnecessary expenses, and driving long-term efficiency. While many clients start the year with ambitious cost-saving initiatives, those goals often fall short. The root issue is typically a lack of broader change management and cultural adoption, paired with a siloed project approach. We focus on breaking barriers between groups and embedding cost-conscious thinking across people, processes, and tools, starting with small wins and building a roadmap for long-term impact.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Liu acknowledged:
“Fundamentally, everything we do in consulting is solving challenges. And every day brings a new challenge. However, from an M&E industry perspective, the current environment has been especially complex. Companies are navigating major transitions, from divestitures like NBCU spinning off parts of its broadcast and cable operations with Versant, to mergers, such as Skydance and Paramount. At the same time, there’s an influx of new market entrants and ongoing restructuring, all of which are driving a heightened focus on strategic cost and revenue optimization — especially for cloud, AI and data usage.”
“Recently, EPAM helped a global media client improve its overall cloud efficiency. The company migrated to the cloud expecting to save money, only to spend more instead. Our team stepped in to assess their cloud usage and identify areas where native cloud services could improve efficiency. Over a period of 20 months, we helped them realize approximately $100 million in cost savings.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of your department’s most significant milestones? Liu cited:
“There are a few things I’m particularly proud of. First, we now have several thousand M&E professionals across consulting, development, QA, design, etc., which is no small feat.”
“Second, we have built strong partnerships across the industry, from leading software vendors to cloud service providers. For instance, we achieved the AWS Media and Entertainment Competency badge last year. This achievement is something few other companies can claim and is a true testament to the talent, capabilities and success we have built over time.”
“Third is our accelerators. These help our clients speed up time to market and realize value faster. We have developed a range of M&E-specific accelerators, including GenAI solutions around creating hyper-personalized marketing videos (Hypermark), AI marketing optimization suite (AIMOS), automated video tagging and highlight reels, search and recommendations (SARE), visual talk-to-your-data capabilities (DIAL Title Mindmap), and even JenAiiTM, an in-person virtual assistant / concierge that combines Unreal Engine on the front end with large language models on the back end.”
“The JenAii solution originally emerged because of challenges in the Telco sector when staffing physical retail locations became difficult. We built this virtualized human assistant to help customers with tasks like troubleshooting phones, placing orders or helping with support questions. Understanding that AI isn’t always perfect, we also built a “Wizard of Oz” mode, where a real human, located remotely, can take over the interaction behind the scenes while maintaining the avatar interface for a seamless, consistent customer experience.”
“While the in-person virtual assistant started in the Telco space, it easily extends to live entertainment. Imagine virtual guides helping fans navigate stadiums, find their seats or locate food vendors; likewise, digital characters in theme parks could answer questions about ride wait times and even book priority lane access.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Liu about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One impactful project on the sports side was a fully cloud-native, media asset management (MAM) platform we built for a major broadcaster. The MAM helped the broadcaster move from an expensive 3rd party solution to a scalable solution leveraging cloud native services, which enabled more flexibility and customization through its headless, API-based design. This system handles everything from asset ingestion, media analysis and metadata management to user management, search and job management — essentially serving as the behind-the-scenes backbone of their media supply chain.”
“We also worked with some other sports broadcasters to leverage AI and machine learning to enhance capacity trending. Specifically, we created a predictive model that would allow them to predict how much to scale their infrastructure and operational teams for specific events or dates to help optimize costs.”
“GenAI is another major focus for EPAM that extends to the M&E sector. We’ve applied agentic GenAI solutions for various use cases from internal operations to customer experience and support.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates your department from its competition? Liu affirmed:
“Concerning differentiators, there are a few key points I usually highlight. First is the depth and breadth of expertise and services EPAM brings to the table. Our deep experience across the end-to-end M&E value chain, combined with strong engineering capabilities, enables us to support everything from streaming platforms and advertisement tech solutions to digital twins and robotics applications.”
“Our scale is another differentiator. EPAM touts 60,000-plus employees across more than 55 countries and regions. We sit in that middle zone between those smaller boutiques and the large consulting companies. This sweet spot allows us to be big enough to scale and have that depth of expertise, but also still be small enough to be agile, provide white glove services and genuinely care about our clients.”
“A final differentiator is that we forge partnerships with our clients. At EPAM, we make sure that we’re not just building some theoretical roadmap, but actually providing end-to-end support so that our client’s vision becomes reality.”
Future Goals
What are some of your department’s future goals? Liu emphasized:
“Our M&E practice’s primary focus is to be a trusted partner for our clients in this space. And similar to EPAM’s large focus around AI enablement, we want to help our M&E clients along their AI journeys. Part of this focus recognizes that our clients have different levels of AI adoption. For example, there was resistance among content providers to GenAI the past few years given the limitations established from the SAG-AFTRA strikes. Today, however, more content providers are showing interest in leveraging AI tools to streamline their teams’ tedious operational work.”
“This year, we also want to build more GenAI accelerators for specific use cases in the M&E space. Of course, we already have our DIAL platform for AI governance and workflow orchestration, and likewise, AI/Run.Transform, which supports organizations amidst their AI adoption journey.”
“Additionally, we have two other unique accelerators that were recently launched. Hypermark, or our hyper personalized marketing video accelerator, is a solution that would allow M&E clients to harness their vast libraries of content plus customer data, like viewing habits, interest, demographics, etc. to create hyper personalized marketing promos that reduce churn and increase stickiness on their media platforms.”
“We also have an AI Media Optimization Suite (AIMOS), which streamlines the marketing workflow – helping marketers automate tasks, gain deeper audience insights and optimize media planning for better results and cost savings. We want to enhance the platform from its more retail media focus towards ad providers so that it can harness all the data behind the Ad Sales process to provide intelligence in media planning, inventory management and campaign optimization to increase revenue generation opportunities.”
