Cognizant puts more than 25,000 professionals in OpenAI deployment group

Cognizant has brought more than 25,000 professionals into a new OpenAI Frontier Capability Group to deploy Codex, ChatGPT and other OpenAI products for enterprise clients, the IT services company said in its October 30 announcement.

The number refers to workers aligned to OpenAI delivery, not a plan to hire 25,000 new employees. Cognizant said more than 21,000 associates have earned more than 40,000 OpenAI badges by completing learning tracks. Since one person can complete multiple tracks, the badge total does not represent the number of distinct trained workers.

The group will initially focus on three areas: AI-native software engineering using Codex, application modernization, and agentic customer operations across sales, service and support.

Cognizant said its sales and customer-success teams already use an OpenAI-based system to identify and pursue opportunities. The announcement did not quantify any resulting change in productivity, sales or pipeline.

For client work, Cognizant said its OpenAI-powered Application Modernizer can handle tasks ranging from reverse-engineering legacy mainframe code to generating cloud-native code, with engineers reviewing every consequential decision. The company also cited its experience modernizing mainframes for more than 500 clients, but did not say how many of those engagements use the new OpenAI-based system.

Cognizant also said it co-engineered an OpenAI-powered assistant for an unnamed global biopharmaceutical company. According to the announcement, the assistant has handled more than 5 million conversations and cut content-creation time by 60%. The company did not identify the customer or disclose the baseline, measurement period or methodology behind those figures.