Speaking on February 24 on the sidelines of the Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum 2025 in Mumbai, Chief Executive Officer Ravi Kumar S said, Cognizant has already trained 4 lakh people in artificial intelligence (AI) as part of its goal to impart such skills to 1 million individuals by 2026.
Cognizant Training 4 Lakh Employees In AI
Kumar said, “So it’s a combination of what we do for ourselves, eat our own dog food, as they call it, take it to our clients, and then take it to the communities around us.”
Further, he referred to this as Cognizant’s Synapse initiative as it was launched to train employees in advanced technologies like Generative AI.
The company appears to be working with governments, academic institutions, and industry partners to train over one million individuals.
When it comes to Cognizant, the IT service provider has trained about 30,000 employees in AI, with another 40,000 in the pipeline.
By the end of 2024, the company had approximately 3,36,800 employees.
Presently, skilling employees with AI is the main focus for most tech firms, especially in the tech industry considering the traditional tech companies are facing disruptions.
Cognizant-Microsoft Partnership For AI Training & Adoption
In the meantime, Kumar and Microsoft’s India & South Asia president Puneet Chandok highlighted the companies’ collaboration and various initiatives in AI training and adoption, in a media interview.
Moving ahead, Chandok said that Cognizant is building a future-ready workforce while talking about the partnership with Microsoft.
Cognizant appears to have purchased 25,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot seats for its associates, along with 500 sales Copilot seats, and 500 services Copilot during April 2024.
So far, the company is using about 20,000 copilots to improve productivity.
For the unawares, Microsoft Copilot, among other things, is an AI-powered assistant that helps developers by suggesting code, completing functions, fixing errors, and improving efficiency in real time.
Further, Chandok added, “So net-net, we have a massive runway and opportunity, with reference to data and (cloud) coming together, customers are looking for a pragmatic value. And for that to happen, partners like Microsoft and Cognizant have to come together.”
According to him, AI can “reduce the floor and raise the ceiling,” suggesting that it breaks the traditional relationship between experience and expertise, “You don’t need 15 years of experience to become a top 50 percentile coder.”
AI-driven Transformations
Chandok also spelled out certain examples across industries wherein AI-driven transformations are in the works.
For instance, Apollo Hospitals is developing AI copilots to assist clinicians in improving efficiency, he said.
Others like MakeMyTrip is working on an AI-powered bot which is meant to help customers in planning their travel itineraries across flights, buses, trains, and hotels.
Adding, “The good news is we’re seeing an impact in India like never before, from classrooms to boardrooms, commerce to communities, farmland to finance.”
Not only that, about 20 percent of the code in Cognizant is being written by machines and accepted by developers, he said.
AI will have a massive impact on the education and healthcare sectors, both Kumar and Chandok agreed.
AI is not just changing how work is done but also structurally changing how the workforce will be deployed across industries, Kumar said.
Further explaining, “This is probably the first time the productivity bump can be significantly higher than anything we have ever seen since the internet came in, 35-40 years ago.”
