The Times of India: Cognizant’s Chief Strategy Officer Says Adopting Digital at Scale is no Longer Elective for Clients

“The market is moving towards AI,” says Malcolm Frank. “Digital in our client markets in the last 2-3 years has seen an awakening.” Excerpts:

“From adopting digital for individual departments like marketing, it is now being adopted at scale. They are looking at a roadmap and they recognize that AI sits at its core. It is no longer elective because the competitor across the street is getting ahead. To support the digital needs of our clients, we have realigned our entire business.

When clients want to implement something that they haven’t done before or want to adopt best practices, they come to us. We have implemented several solutions with clients developed in our collaboratories. For us, it is a good test bed because once we see a specific industry problem multiple times, we can convert it into solutions and take it to market ourselves.

There are three broad categories of AI. The first, artificial narrow intelligence is what the market is talking about today and will be there for the next 5-10 years. It has a specific purpose and will give you answers to direct questions like ‘Get me to the airport’. It cannot process complicated questions like, what will rice do to my health. While people can build it for bad purposes, 95% will be beneficial. There is no need to fear this AI.

Artificial general intelligence is raising ethical concerns. It can do what a human does and replace humans. Deep AI communities are debating on whether this will happen in the next 20 years or happen at all.

Artificial super intelligence is when computers don’t have the IQ of a smart human but unlimited intelligence theoretically. This is when we won’t be able to understand what the machine is doing. While this is something that may or may not occur, it is being looked at with great concern.”

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