As generative AI reshapes everything from search to shopping, EPAM Systems, Inc. is betting that marketing needs more than automation—it needs a structural overhaul.
This week, the digital engineering firm announced the North American launch of Empathy Lab by EPAM, an AI-native agency designed to help brands re-architect marketing around intelligent, human-centered growth systems. The move follows a year-long European rollout that saw Empathy Lab partner with global brands and major agency groups looking for something more than incremental AI pilots.
The pitch is clear: AI isn’t just another tool in the stack. It’s a forcing function that’s collapsing silos between product, data, commerce, and experience—and CMOs are on the hook to make it all work.
From Automation to Orchestration
For the past two years, most large enterprises have focused on embedding AI into discrete workflows—content generation, audience segmentation, media buying, customer service. But according to EPAM, that phase is ending.
“2025 was the year brands embedded AI,” the company suggests. “2026 will be the year leaders re-architect marketing for orchestration, not efficiency.”
That distinction matters. In an environment defined by AI-powered search results and agentic commerce flows—where autonomous systems can research, compare, and purchase on a user’s behalf—the traditional funnel is compressing. Discovery, evaluation, and transaction increasingly happen in a single, AI-mediated layer.
For CMOs, the risk is optimizing for speed and cost while eroding brand differentiation and emotional connection. Automating creative production is easy. Building durable demand in an AI-filtered world is harder.
Empathy Lab is EPAM’s answer to that gap: a hybrid consultancy and build partner that combines engineering, AI platforms, and brand strategy into what it calls “intelligent growth systems.”
What Empathy Lab Actually Does
Unlike traditional creative agencies—or even digital transformation consultancies—Empathy Lab is positioned as an AI-native operating layer for marketing organizations.
Its core offering revolves around designing and deploying agentic platforms: AI-powered systems that integrate insights, creative development, commerce, media activation, and measurement into a single connected framework.
Over the past year in Europe, the group has developed a suite of AI-powered accelerators spanning the full marketing lifecycle:
- Synthetic Audiences: Used by product teams at Mars to augment traditional research with AI-generated synthetic research cohorts, helping accelerate product validation and go-to-market cycles.
- Agentic Retail Media Platform: Built for a major UK supermarket chain, this system reworked internal workflows to better align brand, commercial, and customer objectives within retail media.
- Integrated AI Marketing OS: Deployed across 700+ marketers at Reckitt, creating a unified AI toolset to drive efficiency, consistency, and growth across global markets.
In each case, the emphasis isn’t on a standalone tool. It’s on building a cohesive system that links marketing activity directly to commercial outcomes.
That system-level approach reflects EPAM’s DNA. Unlike legacy agency networks, EPAM’s roots are in engineering and enterprise-scale platform development. Empathy Lab layers creative and strategic capabilities onto that foundation.
A Different Kind of Agency Model
The North American expansion signals EPAM’s intent to compete more aggressively in a space traditionally dominated by holding companies like WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis—each of which is investing heavily in AI-driven transformation.
But Empathy Lab isn’t positioning itself as a rival creative shop. Instead, it’s targeting the structural problem inside modern marketing organizations: fragmentation.
According to EPAM’s Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer Elaina Shekhter, many CMOs are now expected to integrate product, technology, data, and experience in ways their organizations were never designed to handle. The result is a patchwork of pilots, point solutions, and vendors with no unifying architecture.
Empathy Lab’s value proposition is to reconnect those siloed functions under a single AI-enabled operating model—one that keeps empathy and human context at the center.
That human-centered framing is deliberate. As generative AI floods the market with content, differentiation increasingly depends on experience design and contextual intelligence rather than sheer output volume.
Leadership and North American Push
To lead the North American rollout, EPAM appointed Ben Hall as Head of Empathy Lab for the region. Hall brings more than 20 years of enterprise growth experience, including roles at Tata Consulting Services and R/GA.
His mandate: scale Empathy Lab across the US and Canada at a time when marketing leaders are facing intensifying pressure to modernize operations without losing brand identity.
Hall points to a common pattern among enterprise CMOs: enthusiasm for AI, followed by overwhelm. Fragmented pilots, overlapping vendor contracts, and unclear ROI have slowed meaningful transformation.
The opportunity, he argues, is not simply more automation—but integration. By aligning insight, creativity, and execution within a unified AI system, marketing teams can respond faster to market shifts while preserving strategic coherence.
Why This Matters Now
The timing of the North American launch isn’t accidental.
AI-native search experiences from major tech platforms are redefining digital discovery. Retail media networks are expanding rapidly. Agentic commerce—where AI agents handle comparison shopping and transactions—is moving from concept to early deployment.
In this environment, marketing teams that operate in disconnected silos risk becoming operationally efficient but strategically invisible.
EPAM’s move also reflects a broader industry convergence. Consulting firms are building creative arms. Agencies are investing in data and AI engineering. Technology providers are embedding marketing workflows directly into platforms.
Empathy Lab sits squarely at that intersection.
By combining enterprise-grade engineering with marketing strategy and creative execution, EPAM is aiming to capture budget that might otherwise flow to traditional agencies, systems integrators, or specialized AI vendors.
The Competitive Landscape
EPAM is entering a crowded field. Accenture Song, Deloitte Digital, and Publicis Sapient have all expanded AI-driven marketing transformation services. Meanwhile, holding companies are rolling out proprietary AI platforms to unify creative and media operations.
What differentiates EPAM may be its heritage as a pure-play digital engineering company. While agencies retrofit AI into creative processes, EPAM starts from a systems architecture perspective.
If Empathy Lab can demonstrate measurable commercial impact—tying AI orchestration directly to revenue growth—it could resonate with CFOs as much as CMOs.
That alignment between marketing performance and enterprise value will likely define the next phase of AI adoption.
The Bigger Shift: Marketing as an Intelligent System
The underlying thesis behind Empathy Lab is that marketing is no longer a collection of campaigns. It’s an intelligent system.
As AI compresses customer journeys and intermediates decision-making, brands must design ecosystems where data, creative, commerce, and loyalty operate in sync.
The companies that win won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most content. They’ll be the ones orchestrating insight and experience most effectively—while maintaining emotional resonance in an increasingly automated environment.
With Empathy Lab’s North American launch, EPAM is signaling that the next chapter of AI in marketing isn’t about tools. It’s about architecture.
For CMOs navigating that transition, the question isn’t whether to use AI. It’s whether their organizations are structurally prepared for it.
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