Cognizant Trains 400,000 in AI, Targets 1 Million by 2026 Amid AI-Driven Transformation:

In his address to Moneycontrol, Chief Executive Officer Ravi Kumar S told us first that Cognizant has achieved training 4,00,000 individuals for AI which puts the firm on track towards the target of training 1 million people by 2026.

Kumar stated, “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.” His remarks were made on February 24 while attending the Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum 2025 in Mumbai.

In regards to this, Kumar has mentioned Cognizant’s Synapse, an initiative geared towards training employees on new technologies like Generative AI. This strategy enables the company along with government, academic institutions, and industry partners to train over 1 million individuals.

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

The focus on training employees with AI as a skill set, heads more towards the major tech firms, specifically in the middle of the industry at a time when legacy companies in tech are moving through chaos.

In the meantime, along with other business leaders, Kumar together with Microsoft’s president of India & South Asia, Puneet Chandok, were interviewed by Moneycontrol where they discussed the companies’ partnership and various activities on the adoption and training of AI.

Cognizant-Microsoft partnership

Speaking on Microsoft partnership, Chandok noted that Cognizant is in process of creating a workforce that is ready for the future. In April 2024, Cognizant acquired 25,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for his employees, including 500 Sales Copilot and 500 Services Copilot seats.

The company has supplied about 20,000 copilots to transform productivity, so far.

Microsoft Copilot, as part of its functionality, assists developers with coding by providing suggestions, completing functions, debugging, and finally optimizing the code on the go.

“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 alumnus further pointed out that AI for him “lowers the floor and raises the ceiling” which shows that the connection between experience and skill gets modified through AI.

“Being a top 50 percentile coder does not require 15 years of experience,” he noted.

He further outlined a few pointers cutting across sectors where AI induced changes are underway.

He claimed that Apollo Hospitals is working on developing AI copilots to help clinicians work more effectively. MakeMyTrip is aslo developing a bot to assist customers with arranging their travel plans for flights, buses, trains, and hotels.

Chandok further explained, The good news is that impact in India is being experienced like never before which spans from agriculture to IT, classrooms to boardrooms, and even communities to finance.

The IT service behemoth assesses that 20 percent of the code in Cognizant was accepted to be written via machines by developers.

The IT service company later disclosed that with their AI-enabled projects, they provide clients with 150,000 lines of code each month. This is roughly calculates to around 2 million lines on a yearly basis.

The assistive coding foundation platform is GitHub where the company uses a hybrid approach to merge man and machines to increase productivity.

Kumar believes this will happen, more software being written, more tech debt being released, more enterprise landscapes being demolished and more backlog being erased. All of this in relation to the projection of AI developing 20% of the overal output codes in Cognizant.

Studies Performed Internally by Cognizant

Cognizant is witnessing a remarkable change in the organizational productivity, and its Copilot platform transforms work processes. As regards 20,000 employees are utilizing Copilot in their day to day tasks, Kumar affirms.

Kumar presented the results from a study done within the company that evaluated AI when measured against organizational productivity.

The research showed that those developers who are within the top 50 percent in the organization’s productivity saw productivity improvements between 17 and 18 percent, while those in the lower 50 percent got an astonishing productivity increase of 37 percent.

Kumar emphasized that, “this is what AI is doing. It is leveling the playing field. Low productivity workers are performing better and high productivity employees have new space for complex work.”

Kumar, a veteran in the IT industry for around two decades, said, “In every field there used to be only a limited number of specialists. This is our chance to make specialization accessible to the masses.”

Influences of AI

Both Chandok and Kumar are of the same mind that AI is going to have a tremendous revolution in terms of education and healthcare.

Kumar pointed out that the Artificial Intelligence affects the workforce by changing the nature of work and how it is performed. “In all probability, this is the first time where the productivity bump can be seen to be significantly higher than anything we have ever calculated since the inception of the internet almost three to four decades back,” he elaborated.

In addition, new technology will improve access to various fields and allow new skills to be developed. “It completely changes the entry barriers to new professions,” he stated, noting that specialization in specific areas of employment tends to create social slabs, which AI can help ameliorate.

Chandok also said that AI is leading to massive gains in productivity for software developers. He further pointed out that the emerging technology will propel IT services and product firms to create and address previously untapped serviced markets.