TECHNOLOGY
C ognizant has taken a different route, announcing a commitment to scale its“ frontier-certified” workforce to 5,000 Frontier Certified Engineers and 10,000 Frontier Business Operators, with the first deployment-ready cohort expected by the fourth quarter of 2026. Rather than temporary embeds, Cognizant is positioning the roles as permanent, accountable positions built on existing industry domain expertise.
Ravi Kumar S., CEO at Cognizant, said:“ Closing the AI outcome gap demands talent who not only understands a client’ s industry deeply but can also reimagine the way work is structured and take endto-end responsibility for delivering results in collaboration with clients, on any model or cloud the client selects. That is what a frontier workforce does.”
Cognizant’ s Chief People Officer Kathy Diaz links the initiative to a broader labour shift.
She added:“ AI has exposed 93 % of jobs to change, and the associated labour value remains untapped because the workforce architecture built for a pre-AI world cannot capture it. So, we rebuilt the architecture for the world we are in now.”
Cognizant’ s frontier workforce is deliberately model and cloudagnostic, spanning partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, AWS, NVIDIA, Salesforce and ServiceNow, with certifications credentialed directly by frontiermodel companies including including GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic’ s Claude, and OpenAI’ s Codex.
Ravi Kumar S
CEO Cognizant