Cognizant to scale to 5,000 Frontier Certified Engineers and 10,000 Frontier Business Operators

• Cognizant's Frontier workforce model to create the human infrastructure that turns AI investment into enterprise outcomes

• Backed by decades of running technology and operations at enterprise scale, Cognizant's human capital operating model embeds outcome-owning Frontier talent inside client operations

• Cognizant Frontier talent operates across any cloud, any model to help close the gap between AI capability and enterprise results

TEANECK, N.J., July 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH), a leading AI Builder and technology services provider, today announced it was committing to scaling its Frontier-certified workforce, the human and operational infrastructure enterprises need to convert AI capability into measurable business results, to 5,000 Frontier Certified Engineers and 10,000 Frontier Business Operators.

Cognizant's people investment will yield its first cohort, which will be both Frontier-assessed and deployment-ready, by fourth quarter, 2026. Cognizant also plans to augment its own Frontier talent pipeline through annual direct hires of Frontier-native talent from American and global universities.

This human capital investment is focused on solving an urgent problem facing enterprises today: most organizations have spent more on AI than on any technology in a generation, and most have little to show for it. Cognizant measures the gap between what AI can deliver and what enterprises actually realize at $4.5 trillion. That gap is not a compute problem. It is a people and process problem, and it will not be closed by provisioning more infrastructure. The required investment is skilling and deploying more Frontier-ready talent into client-oriented delivery to help clients realize a return on their technology investment.

"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 end-to-end responsibility for delivering results in collaboration with clients, on any model or cloud the client selects," said Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. "That is what a Frontier workforce does. By taking accountability for outcomes rather than stopping at technology deployment, we can help clients accelerate measurable results while managing risk. Cognizant's industry context and experience position us uniquely to unlock the value that has remained out of reach during this shift toward outcome-based delivery and a new chapter in human capital."

Cognizant's Frontier workforce is model- and cloud-agnostic by design. Its teams build an organization's unique context into whatever stack the client has already chosen, across a partnership footprint that spans Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, AWS, NVIDIA, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. The result is durable capability designed for enterprise ownership and portability across environments, otherwise known as solutions that are geared towards the problems being experienced by our client, not the closest thing a proprietary platform can accomplish.