Good morning. When Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S has a thesis about new technology, he tests it inside his IT consulting and outsourcing company. That’s led to a Guinness World Record in which more than 53,000 employees came together to vibe code in the world’s largest online generative AI hackathon (250,000 participated over the week). Generative AI is also changing his strategy for hiring and structuring the company in ways that challenge conventional wisdom. His advice:
Hire more junior employees: “The pyramid is going to be broader and shorter, and the path to expertise is going to be faster. This year, we are hiring more school graduates than ever before. I can take a school graduate and give them the tooling so they can actually punch above their weight. AI is an amplifier of human potential. It’s not a displacement strategy.”
Focus on interdisciplinary skills: “We are now going to hire non-STEM graduates. I grew up thinking, the more you specialize, the more premium you get. If it’s faster to expertise, then expertise is not the asymmetry. Intelligence is not the asymmetry. Applying intelligence is the asymmetry. If I’m a historian, I could blend it with computational skills and become a futurist. If problem solving is assisted with machines … the mix of people in the core is going to be non-STEM disciplines like anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, journalists; people who can be more purposeful problem finders.”
Adopt a Hollywood model: “It created an agile system where you assemble teams for a project for a broader purpose, and you dismantle it after it is done. The studio was a physical entity, production houses were the capital structures, and everything else was fluid. The constraint [for corporations] was institutional knowledge, tribal knowledge, the heritage of the company, the enabling layers of finance, HR, all of it …We can feed that tribal knowledge in whatever form we get into the LLM to build an agent on the other side, which is very contextual … You make the AI capital permanent, the agentic capital permanent, and you unleash people to be the variable component.
Go with your gut: “You build your thesis or your hypothesis on gut, which is a combination of experience, intuition, and connecting the dots, and then you layer it with data, and you get close to 60, 70% and then you’d stop layering it with any more data, because you’d be late. And then you go back to your gut and push it through. Rethinking your assumptions in a world which is moving at a high pace is important.”
Click here for the full interview with Kumar. And I’m arriving in Riyadh today for the 2025 Fortune Global Forum. I hope you’ll join us on Oct. 26 and 27 via livestream, which you can watch here.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
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CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Jim Edwards.
