WEF 2026: BPO is Cognizant’s fastest-growing business, says CEO Ravi Kumar

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S and CFO Jatin Dalal with Chandra R Srikanth, Executive Editor, Moneycontrol at WEF 2026 in Davos.

• Cognizant's BPO services see fastest growth in recent quarters.
• AI and automation are transforming enterprise operations and pricing.
• India is emerging as a global hub for both technology and operations delivery

Did our AI summary help?

Cognizant’s business process outsourcing (BPO) services have emerged as its fastest-growing line of business over the past few quarters, with CEO Ravi Kumar flagging strong demand as enterprises increasingly rethink their operations in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).

“Our BPO services are actually our fastest-growing services in the last few quarters,” Kumar told Moneycontrol at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on January 22.

Kumar attributed the momentum to companies pushing for deeper changes in the way work gets done, not just incremental upgrades.

“There is process re-invention… and there is process re-imagination,” he said, adding Cognizant is focusing on the operations layer of enterprises, where the work actually happens.

The comments come at a time when business process management (BPM)/BPO firms, once dismissed as the labour-heavy cousin of IT services, are emerging as key players in the enterprise technology landscape.

Integrated technology operations, once the stronghold of IT firms, are now being executed meaningfully by companies that began as BPMs or BPOs. The shift is being driven by AI and agentic automation, which are reshaping how business processes run, from workflows to decisioning to exception handling.

Operations, tech convergence

This shift is also changing how clients view technology and operations. “Operations and technology are going to be intertwined,” Kumar said.

He pointed to an opportunity where enterprises use productivity savings to fund further transformation.

Cognizant CFO Jatin Dalal also weighed in on the shift, saying it is forcing companies to rethink how services are priced in the AI era. Traditionally, human cost was the biggest component but AI delivery has introduced multiple components, including infrastructure, LLMs, hosting, agents, and training the agent.

“How do you marry these five and create an outcome-based pricing for customers? So, that's what we are focused on,” Dalal told Moneycontrol.

India: Operations tower for the world

Kumar also linked the BPO opportunity to India’s expanding role in global services delivery.

“It’s a big opportunity for India because India always had the hub of technology. Now it is having the hub of operations,” he said. “So India can actually be the operations towers for global companies.”

The country’s next phase of services growth could be led by operations, not just IT, he said. Cognizant sees its BPO business as a central piece of this transition. “Our BPO services are a blockbuster service for us,” Kumar said.