Cognizant doesn't have all the answers on AI – it’s betting on early careers anyway

Harvard data found that AI has pushed entry-level hiring down by roughly 80% per quarter since 2023.

As the rest of the industry pulls back, tech giant Cognizant made the deliberate decision to embrace a “counter-narrative.” It is doubling down on its commitment to early careers: the tech giant hired 25,000 graduates in 2025 and plans to exceed that number in 2026.

"We need them," Kathy Diaz, Chief People Officer at the 350,000-person tech employer, tells UNLEASH plainly. They are "digital natives" and AI-fluent "learning athletes" who "are pivoting so strongly and successfully towards the future."

Cognizant is seeing the benefit of its investment with retention sitting at 89% for its entry-level talent.

It's a stance that runs from the top: Cognizant's CEO Ravi Kumar has been "very vocal about having a counter-narrative," Diaz shares – a clear indicator that that early career talent is not just a HR focus, it is a business decision for Cognizant.

Redesigning the org chart for graduates

Cognizant isn't just hiring graduates — it's rebuilding its structure to give them room to grow.

Diaz is candid that many companies are taking the wrong approach. They’re too focused on current roles, but, in reality, the entry-level roles of today are different from in the past. Because of AI, graduates are freed from admin-heavy work; they’re able to “be more productive and do more interesting work” from day one, Diaz adds.

Cognizant is redesigning its talent architecture to be future-ready: “We understand where people are today, and we’re able to bridge them to where we believe the future will be. It’s a benefit to us that we’ll have future-ready talent faster.”

In practice, this means creating two new roles optimized for the AI era. The roles — frontier certified engineer and frontier business operator — are designed to convert AI fluency into measurable business results. The business has a target of 5,000 engineers and 10,000 operators by Q4 2026, which will be largely filled from its graduate pipeline.

“There is fog right now in our industry – so providing clarity on where we think [future] roles are, even if we don’t get it 100% right, and then starting to bridge people gives a lot of confidence,” notes Diaz.

As Cognizant redesigns it’s talent architecture, it is flattening the organizational pyramid, moving away from traditional, hierarchical management and toward new "player-coach" managers that are both active contributors and coaches for their teams.

This creates opportunity for entry-level workers to become future player-coach roles. Graduates will have the opportunity to rotate across industries, client accounts and role types, providing a breadth and depth of experience across the business.

“You need to be a practitioner in order to be a really effective manager,” Diaz explains.

Designing the future of work for what graduate actually wants – "more opportunity” and to be "empowered” – is paying off for Cognizant.

Early-career retention sits at 89% worldwide. "Your first job is a special job," Diaz says. "It creates a lot of meaning for people, where a company took a bet on them."

Built in-house: The learning platform behind the strategy

The clearest evidence of how seriously Cognizant is taking early career talent architecture is Skillspring, its own learning system.

Skillspring was built in-house because nothing on the market "met the moment" for the scale of a workforce of 350,000, or the interdisciplinary skills Cognizant needs to build to be future-ready, according to Diaz.

Evidently, learning is a core infrastructure, not an HR add-on, at Cognizant: "It's part of our operating model to have learning as part of our AI infrastructure."

Specifically focused on new generations entering the workforce, Skillspring runs a personal learning assistant that removes the “friction” from trying to guess what to learn next. Cognizant also has a personalized AI fluency dashboard scoring every employee from "awareness" up to "champion."

Cognizant has just changed the scoring algorithm — Diaz was pleased that people noticed their score shifted. Leaders have had to be upfront with workers that the bar keeps moving: "The pace of how AI fluent you need to be is going to change every quarter."

The payoff is measurable. Employees translate that learning into practice through Bluebolt, Cognizant's internal innovation tool, which has delivered more than $150 million in annualized cost savings for clients. Early career talent is the cohort submitting the most ideas into Bluebolt.

Given those results, Cognizant plans to “keep investing more” into early careers. Diaz concludes: "We've invested more than we have in the past, and that trajectory will continue."

This is Cognizant’s business priority going forward; "we're okay with the fact that it's a counter-narrative."