Cognizant hired 20,000 entry-level graduates last year and expects to grow that number in 2026, with Chief Executive Officer Ravi Kumar S pushing back against fears that artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs for new entrants to the workforce.
Speaking at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, Kumar said concerns about a collapse in entry-level employment have been overstated. “There was a little bit of fearmongering from reading about the fact that there’s going to be a collapse of jobs,” he said. “I think there will be more jobs.”
Kumar, who oversees a workforce of more than 350,000 employees, framed AI as an amplifier rather than a replacement. The company’s position is that a new recruit equipped with AI tools can deliver significantly more value than a graduate could without them — compressing the time it takes to develop expertise. Some of the new graduate roles are expected to fall under Cognizant’s AI Builder strategy, which has introduced two new job categories: Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator.
The hiring commitment comes as Cognizant continues its own restructuring to reorient around AI-led services delivery. Kumar acknowledged the company has not been immune to workforce changes, but argued the overall direction for entry-level employment remains positive.
On how AI productivity should be measured, Kumar was critical of what he called tokenmaxxing — using the volume of AI tokens consumed as a performance metric. “It has to be grounded in the company’s hustle,” he said at the Fortune event, titled “Great Restructuring: Rethinking Talent Strategy in the Age of AI.”
His broader view on the future of services delivery: “We have to go from delivering projects, delivering billable hours, owning outcomes, and finally we have to underwrite those outcomes and be paid for those outcomes. I think that is the future.”
Cognizant is among India’s largest IT services employers, with nearly 70% of its global workforce based in India.
