BENGALURU: Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries spoke to TOI after the earnings announcement.

Cognizant beat its full-year growth guidance in 2019, but the company wants to do better and sees momentum returning. CEO Brian Humphries told ET in an interview that the IT services provider is making investments in sales and marketing to boost long-term growth.

Since taking charge on 1 April, 2019, Brian Humphries, CEO, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., has just completed nine months in the hot seat and will now be expected to deliver results on some of his initiatives especially the ones relating to organisational restructuring. In an email interview, Humphries talks about the strategies, demand environment and the India market.

The future of work is always in the future, but it is approaching much faster than ever before. We believe 2020 will be the year of realisation for many organisations and leaders. Here are our top five predictions of how the way we work, live and play will change in 2020.

Customer satisfaction is not just a measure of how well a company’s products or services meet or exceed customer expectations, but also a critical determinant of overall business success. In this article, we explore customer satisfaction and its importance through selected quotes from leading industry experts.

The US$8.8 trillion industry is growing at 3.9 per cent ― ahead of the global economy for the eighth consecutive year ― and continues to be one of the most dynamic industries. In this day and age of selfies and social media, travel industry providers must distinguish themselves in providing “Insta-worthy” experiences.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the power to completely transform the way we do things, personally and in business. We have seen many cases of small businesses that have used AI to deliver exceptional services and products that go on to outshine the competition, or examples where businesses have completely revolutionised an internal process.

Businesses have entered an era of eternal data-harvesting, making data an extremely valuable commodity. And for that reason, as with any other high-value asset, it is vulnerable.

A generation of executives uncomfortable with technology spell trouble for business longevity. While CIOs have ascended the ranks, many failed to translate technology’s benefits to business value.

New January jobs data from the United States Labor Department shows that women now outnumber men in the workforce (50.04%) for the first time since the Great Recession. Driven in part by the country’s lowest unemployment rate since the mid-1960s, every industry – even traditionally male-dominated ones – must now aggressively compete to attract and retain female employees.

The last quarter of 2019 saw a big jump in demand for a bundle of jobs that could dominate the future, per an index tracked by the IT services firm Cognizant.

Hollywood film-making is a boom-bust business. But might fast evolving technologies like AI improve the odds?

Perhaps so.

The digital era is catalysing business; it is unleashing technological change that may appear chaotic on the surface, but is resulting in massively powerful systems of intelligence that enable humans and machines to collaborate securely. By opening up newer means of communication with large data exchanges, new, connected ecosystems are changing the way people, devices and organizations exist, work and interact.

Would you buy a product or service from a company you have not heard of but was recommended by your voice-based personal assistant? Well, 46% of consumers in Southeast Asia recently surveyed said they would.

If you have been exploring blockchains and distributed ledger technology (DLT), you know it’s a noisy and confusing space. As with any early tech, very smart people disagree about what the future will look like. Fueled by open source tools, innovation has dispersed and accelerated to a pace at which no organization on their own can keep up. Throw in a steep learning curve, and it’s really hard to know if you are making the right move. So what can you do?

As we look ahead to the trends and technologies that will likely dominate this next year and decade, it makes sense to begin by unpacking how AI might continue its march forward and the opportunities it will create for female entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers, and others.

“The pace of business change has intensified dramatically as the fruits of digital technologies expand to the entire economy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In 2020, I hope to see the transformative potential of technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation reach the next level in helping businesses solve bigger challenges and invent entirely new products, services and experiences.”

In mid December, LinkedIn revealed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) Specialist was the top emerging job for 2020; this may not be of much surprise but it does beg the question of what AI specialists actually do, and what the job entails. What are the exact skills and knowledge businesses need from AI Specialists?

(First published in The Business Times, Singapore, on January 3.) If we were to think of digital networking as vehicles, 3G would now seem like riding a cart, 4G like driving an economy car with decent mileage, and 5G would be like breaking the sound barrier with an F-16 fighter jet. Put simply, speed is the benchmark for network connectivity, and 5G is set to be more than 30 times faster than the fastest available option.

Cognizant’s Bret Greenstein, global head of artificial intelligence and analytics, and Matt O’Kane, head of artificial intelligence and analytics for Europe discuss how organizations can approach implementing evolutionary AI.

There are legitimate questions about the ethics of employing AI in place of human workers. But what about when there's a moral imperative to automate?

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, the recently-anointed chairman and managing director of tech major Cognizant’s Indian arm says that quality of talent available for recruitment has actually improved in the last few years. But that isn’t enough for an industry that is turning really hungry for some new-age skills. He elaborates on these skills in this two-part interview.

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy was recently appointed as Chairman and Managing Director of tech major Cognizant’s India operations. With new CEO Brian Humphries taking charge at the global level, Cognizant has brought about changes to its strategy and operations.

David Ingham, digital partner in media and entertainment, explores the various ways in which AI is changing the entertainment industry.

In 2007, Pradeep Bhaskaran joined Cognizant to oversee HR for 10 countries around the world. Today, that number is 47. As head of HR for global growth markets, Bhaskaran is responsible for more than 60,000 associates across 52 nationalities that speak 34 languages. And those figures are only set to grow.

Cognizant on Friday announced the retirement of its Chief People Officer (CPO) James Lennox and appointment of Becky Schmitt, currently senior vice president and CPO at Sam’s Club

“The lesson here is that business leaders need to be AI-aware,” says Jeff Olson, Head of Applied AI & Analytics for ANZ. “To do this, they must embrace data as the source of wisdom and value for their business. They need to ask better questions and expect more ― don’t ask for another report or spreadsheet, ask ‘Why?’ until you understand the root causes.”

To “beat the robots,” we shall need to join them. Robotic personal assistants will help buy back at least that 15 percent capacity (or more) needed for the skills of tomorrow. And that is nothing to be afraid of.

“With greater visibility of technology-driven initiatives, CIOs have to be better politicians than ever,” says Pring.

Earlier this year the potential for widescale disruption of the electric grid was highlighted, following a nationwide powercut. This vulnerability was caused by the combined complexity of integrating more renewable energy and distributed energy resources (DERs). We need to treat this as a serious wake-up call.

“We have reskilled our employees at scale through every disruptive technology shift to date, be it Mainframe, distributed computing or Internet. While those shifts were driven by single technologies followed by long periods of stability, digital is significantly different. In digital, we see the coming together of multiple technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain, additive manufacturing and 3D printing, and we are less likely to see long periods of stability,” says Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, CMD.

Smart devices, powered by the hyper-connected Internet of Things (IoT), are becoming ever more prevalent and pervasive in our lives, and the trend will only continue. With a growing number of devices, the opportunities to use IoT to reshape industries and societies are also increasing.

“Hybrid cloud in all its permutations supplies the capabilities, agility, standardization, scalability and enhanced control needed for an enterprise to quickly develop, deploy and support...

“Conversational AI is the next stage, and it is what is making voice way more popular than it was before,” explains Philippe Dintrans, Chief Digital Officer, Banking and Financial Services, Cognizant.

For those living with chronic conditions, clothing can serve as a frictionless digital Sherpa leveraging biometrics, environmental data, and feedback mechanisms to guide the wearer toward better managing their disease and medication.

We are already witnessing the infiltration of healthcare and healthcare delivery by robots. In the next few years this infiltration will become a full-on assault on the traditional apprenticeship nature of medical training and care delivery. The reasons for this are simple: demand for care exceeds capacity; our clinical knowledge base is expanding at unprecedented rates that make it impossible for any clinician to keep abreast; cost of care is too high; access to care has been constrained by physical barriers – the location of a facility or the hours of its operation.

Technology advancement and broad-based commercialization of wearables and sensors are pivotal to the shift towards siteless trials enabling remote, unobtrusive and real-time capture of patient data. This use of sensors and real-time data capture vastly improves the quality of clinical data with the potential to reduce site queries and monitoring visits, not to mention the accessibility to unprecedented volumes of patient data to power safety and clinical insights.

Like it or not, AI will soon infiltrate every aspect of our society from our refrigerators to autonomous cars and everything in between. Combined with data and data science, AI offers new, smart ways to solve existing problems and create fresh and exciting opportunities. But how do you determine the importance of an AI initiative for your organization and how do you ensure you derive the maximum benefit from implementing such projects?

IT firm Cognizant has appointed Greg Hyttenrauch as its Executive Vice President and President of Digital Systems & Technology.

Intelligent process automation is increasingly seen as a complement to robotic process automation, extending the scope of robotic process automation with AI technologies. CIOs and other IT leaders should consider some of the important distinctions between the two automation technologies as part of their technology roadmaps.

Companies remain as confused as ever about how best to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act, the act that enhances privacy rights and consumer protections for California residents, which goes into effect on January 1, 2020. For most organizations, the overriding questions are how big is the CCPA transition going to be; how much interest will consumers have; and how many will click the Delete My Data button?

A global survey of more than 2,500 business and technology leaders conducted by the research firm ESI ThoughtLab, on behalf of Cognizant, a provider of IT services, suggests that the amount of money organizations are willing to invest in IT as a percentage of revenues has substantially increased. This is mainly thanks to the rise of various digital business transformation initiatives.

“To be successful in today’s competitive retail industry luxury brands need to grow and scale. But opening stores internationally is no longer enough. As a result, we are seeing more and more well-known labels merging, as with LVMH’s acquisition of Tiffany announced today.”

“Whether new advances in technology fill us with excitement or dread, the fact is that the physical aspects of our lives are only going to become more integrated into the virtual world. With the likes of swarm intelligence, the tactile internet and edge computing becoming increasingly advanced, the technology around us is simply becoming smarter and significantly more insightful.”

“Gen Z has provided a glimpse into the future,” writes Tiran Dagan, chief digital officer. “Now is the opportunity for marketers to create it.” Excerpts from MarTech Advisor’s article:...

While most executives at financial institutions agree that artificial intelligence (AI) is important to their organization’s success, few have fully implemented AI projects.

Excerpts from Business Insider Australia’s article: “2020 is almost upon us. As this year winds to a close, we took a look at some of the big tech trends business executives predict will take...

“The story of Cognizant will be the return to growth,” says CEO Brian Humphries. “We have always been the bellwether of the services industry and our great ambition is to re-accelerate...

“Organisations must conduct a rigorous ‘needs’ assessment and carefully plan their roadmap to deliver a flexible, secure and scalable IoT solution,” writes Muthu Kumaran, Global Delivery...