Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S stressed the company’s human capital strength while addressing investors and analysts at Investor Day 2025 in New York on Tuesday.
“We are a human capital company. The first thing I did when I came on board was to have employees on my side. And then I had clients on my side and now I’m hoping investors are on my side. There are 70,000 people who have 10-plus years in Cognizant. That was the essence of who we were,” he said.
“We are a hiring magnet. Right now, I have the ability to hire 20,000 laterals per quarter. I am not only preparing for a slow velocity market, but preparing for a high velocity market if it happens at any point of time,” he added.
“So we hired 20,000 school graduates. We think when the next wave comes, we have more people inside even before we can start to hire,” he said. Nearly 14,000 associates have returned to the company, he told analysts.
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Cognizant will outline its strategies and future plans during the upcoming Investor Day, where insights from key clients will also be shared.
Every time there was a new wave, everybody went and hired people. However, Cognizant first used a reskilling infrastructure to get ready at scale in economics, he noted.
The strength of Cognizant’s culture comes from entrepreneurial spirit, he added, sharing that the company’s Bluebolt innovation initiative has given rise to 2,50,000 ideas from the company’s associates with 50 per cent of them in AI.
The next wave of enterprise transformation is in the areas of embedded engineering; “Phygital” product engineering; smart manufacturing; autonomous systems; AI; enabling hyper-productivity; Industrialising AI and ‘agentifying’ the enterprise, he said.
Kathy Diaz, Chief People Officer, Cognizant, said, there is an increasing returner rate with over 50 per cent increase in two years, and 20,000 more in pipeline.
The company said that in 2023-2024, it had three imperatives. The first was to become an employer of choice. The second was to optimise delivery and operations by improving margin execution on large deals, restructure and streamline the organization with NextGen programme. The third was to accelerate growth by reinvigorating financial services, extend growth beyond healthcare into products and resources and CMT.
