For most large enterprises, getting access to frontier AI models is no longer the hard part. The harder part is finding people who know how to wire those models into the systems a business already runs on. Cognizant is now putting a very large number behind that problem.

The Nasdaq-listed IT services company, which runs most of its delivery from India, has formed an OpenAI Frontier Capability Group that brings together more than 25,000 professionals aligned to delivering OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT, for clients. The company announced the group on 30 October.

Three places to start

The group will begin with three areas of work:

• AI-native software engineering with Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent, to help engineers write, test and ship code.
• Application modernisation, using the OpenAI-powered Cognizant Application Modernizer across the full lifecycle, from reverse-engineering legacy mainframe code to generating cloud-native code. Cognizant says engineers review every consequential decision, and points to its experience modernising mainframe systems for more than 500 clients.
• Agentic customer operations, applying OpenAI models to sales, service and support.

Its mandate covers both building OpenAI-powered systems and supporting how they run for clients once they are live.

Tested at home first

Cognizant says it tends to try new approaches inside its own business before selling them. Its sales and customer success teams already use a solution built on OpenAI models to find and pursue new opportunities, and the company plans to carry those lessons into client work.

“With Codex and ChatGPT, OpenAI is changing both at once. We are committing more than 25,000 of our people to bring that change inside our clients’ businesses. We started with our own, and OpenAI is beginning to reshape how we sell,” said Ravi Kumar S, Chief Executive Officer, Cognizant.

On the client side, Cognizant cited a global biopharmaceutical company for which it co-engineered an OpenAI-powered enterprise assistant that combines search, content creation, translation and approvals in one place. According to the company, the assistant has handled more than five million conversations and cut content-creation time by 60%.

Building the bench

The new group sits on top of a skilling push that has been running across the company. More than 21,000 Cognizant associates have earned over 40,000 OpenAI badges, each awarded for completing a learning track on OpenAI technologies. Cognizant also says its Codex hackathons in India and the Americas drew more than 12,000 participants.

The practice will draw on Cognizant’s Frontier workforce model, under which it is developing Frontier Certified Engineers and Frontier Business Operators credentialed directly by frontier-model companies. Pairing business operators with engineers reflects a practical reality of enterprise AI: someone has to understand how a process actually runs, where judgement is needed and how exceptions are handled, not just how to build the software.

Two caveats are worth noting. The 25,000 figure describes professionals aligned to the practice, not a plan to hire 25,000 new people. And Cognizant has not disclosed revenue targets, a client count or an investment figure for the group.

Why it matters for CIOs

Cognizant is an Advanced partner in the OpenAI Partner Network, and the new group gives that relationship a dedicated structure spanning both technical delivery and business operations. The move also comes shortly after Cognizant lined up a large team behind Google’s Gemini, according to The Next Web, a sign that IT services firms are building model-specific delivery benches as clients spread their bets across AI providers.

For technology leaders, the takeaway is that the bottleneck in enterprise AI is shifting from model access to implementation capacity: people who can modernise legacy code safely, connect agents to real customer workflows and keep those systems running. With much of that talent based in India, the country’s delivery centres are likely to be where a large share of this frontier AI work actually gets done.

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