Cognizant trains 4 lakh people in AI as part of its broader 1 million target, says CEO Ravi Kumar

(L to R) Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S and Microsoft’s India & South Asia president Puneet Chandok.

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, Chief Executive Officer Ravi Kumar S told Moneycontrol.

“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,” Kumar said on February 24 speaking on the sidelines of the Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum 2025 in Mumbai.

Kumar referred to Cognizant's Synapse initiative, which was launched to train employees in advanced technologies like Generative AI. The company works with governments, academic institutions, and industry partners to train over one million individuals.

Within Cognizant, the company has trained about 30,000 employees in AI, with another 40,000 in the pipeline. The company ended 2024 with approximately 3,36,800 employees.

Skilling employees with AI is in focus for most tech firms, particularly within the tech industry at a time when traditional tech companies are facing disruptions.

Meanwhile, Kumar and Microsoft’s India & South Asia president Puneet Chandok highlighted the companies’ collaboration and various initiatives in AI training and adoption, in a joint interview with Moneycontrol.

Cognizant-Microsoft partnership

On the partnership with Microsoft, Chandok said that Cognizant is building a future-ready workforce. In April 2024, Cognizant purchased 25,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot seats for its associates, along with 500 sales Copilot seats, and 500 services Copilot.

Of this, the company is using about 20,000 copilots to improve productivity.

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.

“So net-net, we have 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,” Chandok said.

The IIM-Calcutta graduate also highlighted that 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,” he said.

Further, he spelled out certain examples across industries wherein AI-driven transformations are in the works.

He said Apollo Hospitals is developing AI copilots to assist clinicians in improving efficiency. MakeMyTrip is working on an AI-powered bot to help customers plan their travel itineraries across flights, buses, trains, and hotels.

“The good news is we’re seeing an impact in India like never before, from classrooms to boardrooms, commerce to communities, farmland to finance,” Chandok further added.

Even the IT services major sees about 20 percent of the code in Cognizant being written by machines and accepted by developers.

In October, the IT services company said it generates 1,50,000 lines of accepted codes per month, or about 2 million lines of code on an annualised basis, using AI tooling into projects to deliver to clients.

The underlying code assist platform is GitHub and the company integrates human effort with that of machines, therefore, improving productivity.

“The 20% (coding by AI of overall) in Cognizant will go through like a hockey stick. And as that happens, we believe more technology, more software will be written, more tech debt will be released out of enterprise landscapes, more backlog will be cleared,” Kumar added.

Cognizant’s Internal Study

Within Cognizant, AI is playing a key role in improving productivity. Kumar said over 20,000 employees are actively using Copilot as part of their daily work.

Kumar shared findings from an internal study, analysing AI’s impact on productivity within the organisation.

The study found that developers in the top 50 percentile saw productivity gains of 17-18 percent, while those in the bottom 50 percentile improved by a whopping 37 percent.

Kumar said this reveals how AI acts as a leveller, helping lower-productivity employees improve their output while giving high-performers additional headroom for complex tasks.

“There were only a small number of specialists available in every discipline. This is our opportunity to democratise specialisation,” Kumar, who has about two decades of experience in the IT industry, said.

AI’s impact

Both Kumar and Chandok agree that AI will have a massive impact on the education and healthcare sectors.

Kumar said that AI is not just changing how work is done but also structurally changing how the workforce will be deployed across industries. “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,” Kumar explained.

Moreover, the latest technology will break entry barriers to professions and ensure social mobility. “It completely changes the entry barriers to new professions,” he said, adding that AI can create upward mobility in jobs by making specialised knowledge more accessible.

Chandok echoed similar sentiments, saying that AI is driving significant developer productivity gains. Further highlighting that it will have a major impact on IT services and product companies, allowing them to create products and serve markets that were previously unserviceable.

Also, read: Infosys, HCLTech CEOs call for an overhaul in IT business models amid AI disruption