As EPAM undergoes a leadership transition, Balazs Fejes steps into the role of CEO, succeeding Arkady Dobkin, the company’s co-founder and long-time leader. Having served as EPAM’s president of global business and chief revenue officer, Fejes brings more than two decades of experience inside the company and a leadership style shaped by entrepreneurship, engineering and global expansion.
For Fejes, the defining wave ahead is AI. Bigger than the cloud, faster than the early days of the internet, and fundamental to how businesses will survive and compete, AI will be the cornerstone of EPAM’s next phase of growth.
“Eventually, we are in the process of repositioning EPAM to be able to take advantage of the wave itself,” he said, in an exclusive interaction with AIM.
For Fejes, this move feels less like a handover and more like a natural continuation. “I’ve spent most of my adulthood building what today you call EPAM,” he said, reflecting on his 21-year journey with the company.
With Dobkin continuing as executive chairman, Fejes emphasises that EPAM’s cultural foundation, engineering excellence, client centricity and transparency will remain intact even as the company adapts to new technological shifts.
Fejes’ story is one deeply rooted in technology. Starting out as a software engineer, he co-founded Fathom Technology, which was later acquired by EPAM. This entrepreneurial start instilled in him an instinct for risk-taking and agility—qualities he believes continue to shape EPAM’s DNA.
“The best way to see if an idea survives is to try it out. Let’s see if you can sell it, if you can find some initial clients or customers for it. Once you are doing that, then invest more,” he explained.
In an industry where many CEOs emerge from finance or operations, Fejes believes his product and a technology-first background gives him a distinct advantage.
“You can decipher the hype. You can actually recognise what’s hype, what’s not true in the hype, what is real and what is something which people are marketing as a message,” he said.
Riding the AI Wave
If the last decade was defined by cloud adoption, Fejes thinks the next will be reshaped by AI. “We see the great opportunities coming that organisations are going to transform themselves. They have to transform to be able to survive. They have to transform to be able to compete,” he said.
EPAM is positioning itself to meet this moment, drawing a clear distinction between AI-assisted efficiency gains and the deeper transformation that comes with AI-native applications. The latter, Fejes argues, will be the real measure of competitiveness in the years to come.
“People are going to build new applications, new solutions, AI-native solutions, where the AI will be the core in the foundation of the application itself,” he said.
At the same time, he urges caution against unrealistic expectations. “There’s a myth…out there that software engineers are no longer going to be important because we’re just going to put in a prompt and out of the prompt will pop out a full-blown enterprise application.”
Instead, Fejes anticipates rising demand for custom software, modernising legacy systems while enabling businesses to differentiate through technology.
AI cannot stand alone; Fejes insists that it requires the right foundations. “AI runs on data, and if you have garbage in, you will get garbage out,” he said.
For EPAM’s clients, this means prioritising cloud migration, modernising application stacks and building robust data platforms.
He also highlighted the growing role of ‘agentic flows’, where applications act with more autonomy. To tap into this, enterprises need modern APIs and re-architected systems, initiatives EPAM is already helping clients pursue. At the same time, the company is preparing its own workforce through AI upskilling programs and the creation of a new ‘AI engineer’ role.
Scaling Culture, Globally
While technology dominates the conversation, Fejes is quick to acknowledge that culture is equally important. Over the past decade, EPAM has expanded beyond its Central and Eastern European roots into India, Latin America and beyond. This growth, he noted, required adapting leadership styles to different geographies, age groups and expectations.
“Engineering-first remains at the core of our culture,” Fejes said, adding that EPAM’s emphasis on delivery quality and client trust has long been its differentiator in a crowded market.
Fejes readily recognises Dobkin’s legacy. “Arkady is not leaving the company. He continues to be an employee as an executive chairman,” he pointed out. Yet, as a Hungarian following a Belarusian founder, he jokes that while some shifts may be cultural—“from borscht to goulash with paprika”—the fundamentals won’t change.
He also admitted the weight of leading through this shift, but frames it as a continuation of the company’s journey rather than a reinvention. The years ahead, he suggests, will test not just EPAM’s strategy but the industry’s ability to separate hype from lasting impact.
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