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For months, the loudest voices in artificial intelligence\u2014including OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman and Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei\u2014warned that entry-level white-collar jobs were headed for extinction. In recent weeks, both have walked back those statements.<\/p>\n
And according to Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S., who oversees a workforce of more than 350,000 employees, the outcry wasn\u2019t just a prediction gone wrong\u2014it was fearmongering.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a little bit of fearmongering from reading about the fact that there\u2019s going to be a collapse of jobs,\u201d Kumar said at Fortune\u2019s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona on Monday. \u201cI think there will be more jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cognizant hasn\u2019t been immune to restructuring and layoffs as it works to transform for the AI era. But Kumar told Fortune\u2019s executive editorial director Diane Brady that the company hired 20,000 entry-level college graduates last year alone\u2014and expects that number to grow in 2026.<\/p>\n
Some of those roles will likely fall under Cognizant\u2019s new AI Builder strategy, which introduces two new positions: Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator. And even though his company is focused in the tech world, candidates don\u2019t need a technical background to qualify.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt could be a history major with skills to identify and use agentic work. It could be a biology major known as life sciences. It could be an HR accountant who can use agentic Claude terminals around them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The workforce pyramid will begin to flatten, Kumar added, as there remains a need for both entry-level workers\u2014as well as leaders to guide directions (he called the chief operations officer the most important role in any company). But in the middle, he said, is where AI will take charge.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAIs will be in the middle of a flow. You want to have a ton of jobs in the front, you will have a ton of jobs in the back,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are going to be validation and verification jobs, and those are going to be authentication jobs. Now, when you have a flat-earth pyramid, the biggest challenge is the middle layers are going to be leaner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cognizant\u2019s CEO says tokenmaxxing has measured AI all wrong<\/p>\n
As companies have raced to demonstrate AI productivity gains, many have turned to token consumption as their primary measuring stick. Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI are among those that have leaned on token metrics as an internal measure of productivity. Kumar thinks that\u2019s the wrong approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the last two years, how you consumed tokens, how much tokens you consumed was a vanity metric,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2026I don\u2019t think you should equate this to the number of paid hours. I don\u2019t think you should equate this to productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, Kumar argued that knowing how and when to deploy tokenization strategically will become a discipline in its own right \u2014 one that individual teams will need to develop and refine based on their specific workflows and business goals.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has to be grounded in the company\u2019s hustle,\u201d he said in the Fortune conversation titled \u201cGreat Restructuring: Rethinking Talent Strategy in the Age of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
The broader shift, in Kumar\u2019s view, is away from measuring inputs entirely: \u201cWe 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. I believe we are going to reforge, and whoever reforges this future is going to be a winner on the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Cognizant #CEO #swimming #tide #hes #hiring #graduates #year #tokenmaxxing #vanity #metric<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For months, the loudest voices in artificial intelligence\u2014including OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman and Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei\u2014warned…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[482,585,960,13615,13613,13614,2822,641,3789,1976,962,310,1680,11603,13630,8537,13629,8402,10311,11851,7978,13631,967,85],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7704"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}