Cognizant expects to invest approximately $1 billion in its generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities over the next three years, the company’s CEO S Ravi Kumar told newspersons, while discussing the June quarter financial results. This will be through a combination of internal platform building, partnerships and a healthcare large language model in partnership with Google, he added.
“The number of projects we have underway focused on cognitive and generative AI, we see this technology generating a new wave of opportunities for us,” he said.
Generative AI has the ability to ignite innovation, enhance performance, capture new value, and provide a competitive advantage.
As a part of its expanded partnership with Google, Cognizant will build on Google Cloud’s Generative AI technology with Cognizant’s AI domain expertise to create a healthcare large language model. This is designed to simplify and improve the accuracy of complex healthcare administrative tasks and strengthen business outcomes for healthcare organisations.
“We have also expanded our relationship with Microsoft to deliver industry solutions and enable AI-led transformation. This includes expanding the focus of our Microsoft Center of Excellence in AI and other next-gen technologies to drive competencies across architecture, technology leadership, value delivery tools, and enablement,” he told analysts in a concall.
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“We expanded our alliance with Google Cloud to help enterprise clients create, migrate, and modernise their AI journeys, and offer clients innovative industry solutions founded on the tenet of responsible AI. Our investments in developing GenAI capabilities include launching the Cognizant Google Cloud AI University, a program designed to train 25,000 Cognizant professionals on Google Cloud AI technologies. We will offer this program to our clients as well,” he said.
Kumar said, Cognizant has more than 100 active client engagements in various stages with a focus on cognitive and generative AI, as well as hundreds more projects using AI services within the context of delivery. “We are designing generative AI offerings for industry-specific solutions, cross-industry use cases in productivity, enablement, under themes like transforming code processes, improving the customer and employee experience, product innovations, software and coding, and knowledge management to name a few,” he said.
For example, one of the world’s largest healthcare product companies, Cognizant is helping to speed up the research process by deploying GenAI to author scientific content. “We developed a workbench that uses GPT models to summarise and generate content from unstructured and structured data, such as laboratory information management systems with the aim of automating the generation of regulatory content,” he said.
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For a top-20 property and casualty insurer, Cognizant has helped frame its GenAI strategy and conduct real-world tests based on company data. For example, Cognizant built a GenAI-based digital virtual assistant that analysed large loss complex claims submissions. By referencing the insurer’s claim data, the virtual assistant was able to guide a human claims handler to gather almost 100 per cent of missing claims information. This simple application is expected to produce millions of dollars in savings through improved operational efficiency and reduced claim costs.
In addition, Cognizant signed a new multi-year agreement with Nuance Communications, a Microsoft company, to help scale the resources for Nuance’s Dragon ambient experience operations. This solution is at the forefront of conversational AI and ambient clinical intelligence.
Kumar said as part of the company’s NextGen program on plans to redistribute some of its development centres from India’s largest cities to smaller cities, the company announced the first phase of this shift with the planned opening of two new centres – one in Bhubaneswar and the other in Indore. “We are looking for smaller cities to retain talent and look for more in these locations,” Kumar said.
