Cognizant CEO: ‘Still At The Early Innings Of Capturing The AI Opportunity’

‘In the second quarter, out of a subset of a client base of nearly 360 key accounts, 97 percent of clients have adopted AI, of which 56 percent are scaling GenAI and out of which 78 percent have demonstrated impact from the adoption and scaling,’ says Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar.

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar said GenAI and agentic AI have become the cornerstones of growth for the global services provider.

Kumar, in his prepared remarks during Cognizant’s fiscal second quarter 2025 financial analyst conference call Wednesday, attributed the company’s success during the quarter directly to its investments in AI.

“Our performance reflects the depth and strength of our portfolio supported by our continued strategic focus on AI-led opportunities and disciplined execution,” he said. “As you can see from today’s results, we continue to make progress towards building a resilient and durable company that thrives in both slow- and high-velocity markets.”

For Cognizant, ranked No. 7 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, the AI opportunity remains a double-engine transformation for its clients’ productivity and innovation, Kumar said

“In the second quarter, we delivered a healthy combination of wins in AI [with] efficiency-led large deals and innovation-led projects, with agentic AI unlocking new revenue pools and spend cycles,” he said. “The progress reported today is the result of the strategic actions we have taken over the past two and a half years to sharpen our innovation engine and develop our capabilities through investments in AI engineering and our platform strategy. While we are still at the early innings of capturing the AI opportunity, I believe the strategic steps are helping drive our performance.”

Teaneck, N.J.-based Cognizant in its second quarter had more than 2,500 early GenAI client engagements compared to 1,400 in the prior quarter, Kumar said. Nearly 30 percent of the company’s was AI-generated in the quarter compared to about 20 percent two quarters ago.

Cognizant’s AI research labs are also accelerating the industrialization of agent-based systems backed by a robust portfolio of 59 U.S. patents, including research focused on building AI platforms and tooling to help clients accelerate the embrace of AI and agentic systems in enterprise landscapes, he said.

Cognizant’s ability to proactively craft AI-driven technology deployments that deliver improved performance, productivity, and cost savings is driving several large wins, Kumar said.

“In the second quarter, out of a subset of a client base of nearly 360 key accounts, 97 percent of clients have adopted AI, of which 56 percent are scaling GenAI and out of which 78 percent have demonstrated impact from the adoption and scaling,” he said.

Cognizant is also actively pursuing opportunities around industrializing AI and agentifying enterprises, Kumar said. This includes proactively helping clients with their AI-led innovations and agentic strategies by quickly evolving capabilities from experimentation to scaled production-grade programs, in particular with cross-service line cohorts anchored by client partner teams to deliver agentic workshops across its client base.

Cognizant also has a number of strategic priorities to amplify its talent, scale innovation, and accelerate growth, Kumar said.

On the talent front, the company continues to prepare its workforce for an AI-led future with increased investments in emerging technology hubs and a new 21-acre Learning Center in Chennai expected to train both new hires and experienced hires in advanced AI skills, he said.

When it comes to scaling innovation, Cognizant just this month launched the Cognizant Agent Foundry, which Kumar said accelerates enterprise scale adoption of agentic AI.

“Agent Foundry is powered by our Neuro AI suite and a strong AI partner ecosystem with hundreds of distinctive agents already available for use,” he said. “It spans industries and platforms with domain-specific small language models, agent templates, and a library of pre-built agents supporting the full agent life cycle.”

Cognizant this week also launched a first-ever vibe coding week for all 344,000 of its employees to evangelize AI-enabled software development cycles as the new and only way to deliver software, Kumar said.

“We believe this is the world’s largest initiative of its kind,” he said. “But what excites me most is the opportunity for every associate to build real AI fluency and deliver continued higher productivity to all our client project work.”

Cognizant this week also launched Cognizant AI training data services for Global 2000 clients who are embracing AI models in their businesses based on its history of helping digital-native leaders train some of the world’s most advanced AI models, Kumar said.

“Working with trailblazers in tech, healthcare, automotive, media, and retail, our more than 10,000 specialists have curated, annotated, and quality-checked billions of data points and millions of data labels across every major modality,” he said. “This includes speech, 2D [and] 3D imagery, video and [so on], often enriched with geospatial metadata for added accuracy. Our domain know-how has enabled us to produce high-precision, specialized data sets across industries. This new strategic offering will help empower enterprises to quickly build, fine-tune, validate, and deploy production-grade AI models at scale.”

Looking ahead, Cognizant continues to position itself for the generative and agentic AI future while building a new opportunity, one defined by agentification at scale with new client spend cycles, Kumar said.

“We see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity enabled by a revolutionary technology to reimagine enterprises’ work, workplaces and the workforce,” he said. “We believe we have a bigger total addressable spend than ever before to partner with our clients on their AI journeys.”

Kumar said he believes the AI wave is different from prior waves, as is Cognizant’s response, including its move to combine its award-winning AI Labs’ work to differentiate AI platforms with interdisciplinary teams.

Furthermore, he said, Cognizant’s “pioneering work” in context engineering, which is building layers of context, tribal knowledge, data flows, and workflows to create efficient and productive agentic systems, is already impacting clients’ agentic AI journeys.

“I call this new layer IP on the Edge, a working description of the evolving transitionary phase of agentic AI,” he said. “Our IP on the Edge progress is a very important differentiator in a fragmented and heterogeneous market of AI builders. We believe our early investments in AI, led by IP on the Edge, our scaled interdisciplinary capability, our partnerships, [and] our continued focus to diffuse AI efficiently into our project and client services teams, have really helped us stay strategic to our clients’ AI journeys.”

Cognizant By The Numbers

For its second fiscal quarter 2025, Cognizant reported total revenue of $5.25 billion, up 8.2 percent from the $4.85 billion the company reported for its second fiscal quarter 2024.

That beat analyst revenue expectations by $60 million, according to Seeking Alpha.

This included health sciences revenue of $1.55 billion, up 6.2 percent year over year; financial services revenue of $1.55 billion, up 6.9 percent; products and resources revenue of $1.31 billion, up 16.0 percent; and communications, media, and technology revenue of $841 million, up 3.1 percent.

North America accounted for 74.6 percent of total revenue.

Cognizant also reported GAAP net income of $645 million or $1.31 per share, up from last year’s $566 million or $1.14 per share. On a non-GAAP basis, Cognizant reported net income of $1.31 per share, up from $1.14 per share. Non-GAAP earnings beat analyst expectations by 5 cents per share, according to Seeking Alpha.

Looking ahead, Cognizant expects third fiscal quarter revenue to be $5.27 billion to $5.35 billion, up 4.6 percent to 6.1 percent over last year. For its full fiscal year 2025, the company expects total revenue of $20.7 billion to $21.1 billion, up 4.7 percent to 6.7 percent.