Cognizant chief AI officer bets on AI future, rejects demise narrative

Mumbai: Unfazed by fresh predictions of AI disruption, Cognizant chief AI officer Babak Hodjat, said the obituary of IT services has been written many times before — during the software era and again with the rise of SaaS. Now, as GenAI and agentic platforms reshape enterprise technology, similar questions are resurfacing.

“We’ve been here before,” Hodjat told TOI. “People have prematurely announced the demise of IT services. But each time, the need for engineering and customisation remained. If anything, we are needed even more now. These agentic building blocks are powerful, but designing systems that are safe, scalable and extensible is not easy. Clients often come to us already using AI tools. They understand AI. But they need help extending it safely and identifying additional use cases.”




“I’m optimistic,” he added. “There will be rough patches driven by expectation mismatches. But every time productivity increases, demand increases too.”

As expectations around AI soar, Hodjat argues the industry is still in an experimental phase. “The expectations are very high — no doubt about that. But we’re still in the figuring-it-out stage,” he said, likening it to the dot-com boom. “The promise is clear, but translating that promise into scaled, reliable value is still a work in progress.”

Hodjat recently received two US patents related to large language models, part of a broader innovation push within Cognizant. The company has secured 61 patents so far, with more in the pipeline, many focused on core AI technologies.

“We have a structured process of inventing — pushing the boundaries of AI — and then bringing those innovations into our platforms and client solutions,” he said. Cognizant operates AI Labs in San Francisco and Bengaluru. “These innovations aim to make AI more reliable, trustworthy and powerful,” he added.

He believes market volatility in IT services stocks reflects expectation mismatches rather than structural decline. “Expectations sometimes assume AI is magic. It isn’t. AI is an engineered discipline,” he said. “There’s a right and wrong way to architect AI systems. We’re not beyond engineering — we’re deep into it.”

Inside Cognizant, developers are increasingly working alongside AI agents, with aggressive upskilling underway across roles. In a recent internal coding event, 40% of participants were non-technical employees.

“Domain expertise remains critical, but now it must be AI-empowered,” Hodjat said. The company runs over 100 internal agents, handling more than 11 million transactions in three months. “Ticket volumes have gone down. Productivity is up — and that’s ROI.”

For services companies, he said, the path is clear: “There is no resistance. We are embracing it fully — investing, building and re-architecting ourselves around AI. This isn’t about survival. It’s about leading in an engineered AI future.”