Cognizant Chief Executive Ravi Kumar said companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, but many are yet to see the expected business benefits as the technology moves from experimentation to large-scale deployment.
Speaking at the company's AI Forum in New York, Kumar said a gap had emerged between the capabilities of AI systems and the value organisations are generating from them.
"There is a lot of reasons why the production value is way below the capability," Kumar said. "If chapter 1 was about broad open based experimentation, chapter 2 would be about specifics, realism, costs, and bridging that gap."
Kumar said about $1 trillion had already been invested in AI infrastructure globally and another $6 trillion to $7 trillion could be invested by 2030. However, he said the business benefits from those investments had not kept pace with advances in AI technology.
"The capability is going up. The production value is right out here. In some ways, that's the gap we are going to address as a company," he said.
According to Kumar, enterprises are increasingly facing rising AI costs without corresponding productivity gains. He cited comments from companies and industry groups that have raised concerns about returns from AI investments.
He also said many organisations had focused on AI model usage without linking spending to business outcomes.
"The pace of change has been absolutely high clock speed. There's been a sense of FOMO, fear mongering, and that has led to token consumption without linkages to ROI and without linkages to outcomes," Kumar said.
Further, Cognizant used the event to outline its strategy around what it calls "AI builders", a model aimed at helping companies deploy AI across software systems and business operations.
The company also outlined changes it expects AI to bring to its own operations and workforce structure. Executives said future organisations would be flatter and rely on a combination of human workers and AI agents.
Chief Strategy Officer Ravi Kiran Kuchibhotla said traditional organisational pyramids would become less relevant as AI adoption increases.
"We're going to be a much flatter organization. It's going to be a much wider organization. We're going to have a lot more agents at the bottom, a lot more interdisciplinary skill sets that are needed for the future," he said.
Cognizant also disclosed details of an internal AI system developed with Workfabric that analyses information from emails, meetings, chats, contracts and other business interactions to identify sales opportunities and customer issues.
Kumar said the system had generated about $200 million in additional sales pipeline so far and could reach $1 billion by the end of the year.
"By the end of the year we think this is going to be $1 billion pipeline just by listening to conversations of our clients and extracting the tribal knowledge to create some insights," he said.
