Cognizant to build 15,000-strong frontier AI workforce
Scheme to help bridge the gap between enterprise AI investment and business outcomes.
Cognizant will work towards expanding its AI-trained workforce to 5,000 frontier certified engineers and 10,000 frontier business operators the business said this week. It expects the first cohort will be ready towards the end of 2026.
At this stage, Cognizant can’t specify the local component of the frontier workforce.
“As Cognizant’s frontier workforce initiative is currently in its early stages, we’re not yet in a position to confirm ANZ-specific numbers or detail how this initiative impacts the channel,” said Carla Ramchand, MD ANZ, Cognizant.
The scheme is aimed at closing the gap between the amount organisations are investing in AI and the outcomes. Cognizant’s own research suggests enterprises could unleash US$4.5 trillion in labor productivity if tasks could be assisted or automated by AI but this is being held back by a lack of skilled workforce.
“Combined with Cognizant’s deep industry experience, it positions us uniquely to unlock the value that has remained out of reach during this shift towards outcome-based delivery,” Ramchand said.
Frontier practitioners trained to deliver outcomes
Cognizant’s frontier workforce will be model- and cloud-agnostic, with teams able to work across Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, AWS, NVIDIA, Salesforce and ServiceNow. The focus will be on delivering outcomes aligned to the client.
“For Cognizant, this goes beyond technology to where we place accountability. Most AI initiatives stop at deployment, but our frontier workforce is designed to take full ownership of outcomes, working across whatever cloud or model a client has already chosen, rather than being tied to one platform,” said Ramchand.
“Additionally, these roles have been built from scratch, rather than retrofitting existing roles for the AI era, because the existing workforce structures weren’t designed for what AI now makes possible,” she added.
Learning path combines AI and operational skills
The frontier certified engineer and frontier business operator tracks will follow structured learning paths, combining AI fluency, process design, data interpretation and operational leadership.
“The goal is to compress the traditional ramp time for associates, giving clients faster access to job-ready talent while giving associates a credentialed, career-defining foundation in human-AI collaboration,” Ramchand told CRN Australia.
Frontier certified engineers will architect and build the agentic systems, including ongoing monitoring, tuning and improvement cycles that follow go-live. These roles bring together domain expertise, AI engineering and accountability. They will be responsible for determining what AI can do and how it must be governed to be trusted in alignment with client requirements.
Frontier business operators will be responsible for delivering outcomes in collaboration in customer environments, managing agents and human teams. They will have the experience across workflows and systems to understand how to refine and improve agent-run processes.
This frontier model is anchored in six principles: interdisciplinary capability, alignment with customer value, human-agent collaboration, full accountability, delivery through a small operational pod, and a single, unified Cognizant experience for the client.
The initiative is anchored by SkillSpring, Cognizant’s proprietary training platform. “The new investment will expand SkillSpring capacity specifically, and fund embedded client engagements worldwide,” said Ramchand.