Cognizant accelerating investment in generative AI: CEO Ravi Kumar

Cognizant on Thursday said it is operating pilots that use generative AI to accelerate consulting, design, engineering and operations with the long-term goal of doubling the productivity of our associates.

“The tech trend on everyone’s mind is generative AI with recent breakthroughs offering the potential to fundamentally transform our clients’ businesses and increase our own productivity,” CEO Ravi Kumar said in his first post-earnings call after taking over from Brian Humphries.

Kumar said Cognizant was accelerating its investment in generative AI. He said Cognizant’s AI accelerator process uses studio environments to collaborate with clients to identify priority AI use cases and rapidly implement prototype solutions for field testing.

“We have conducted ideation sessions with over 30 clients and are now working to industrialize solutions to their common challenges. We believe generative AI will revolutionize the technology services industry, creating higher rates of productivity and driving greater prominence for software and data engineering expertise.”

Kumar said that last month Cognizant launched neuro IT operations, a platform that brings new levels of automation and intelligence to applications and infrastructure operations. He said that by applying an AI-led automation-first approach, the company was enabling enterprises to innovate faster and drive down cost and risk.

“We believe that enacting new IT operations can actually reduce operational costs by 25% to 45%, reduce mean time to delivery and mean time to detect by 30% to 50% and reduce FTEs by 15% to 30% compared with the use of traditional approaches,” he added.

The US-based software exporter’s net profit increased 3% in the fourth quarter to $580 million on lower administration costs and a bump in other income.

He also said that across every industry, the cloud is today the biggest transformational opportunity. In line with this, Cognizant introduced a new cloud platform called Cognizant Skygrade. With Skygrade, he said Cognizant can accelerate migration and modernization programs by shortening transformation time by 20% to 40%, resulting in faster value realization while reducing ongoing run and governance costs by 15% to 25%.