{"slug": "cognizant-ceo-is-swimming-against-the-tide-on-ai-hes-hiring-over-20000-graduates", "title": "Cognizant CEO is swimming against the tide on AI: he’s hiring over 20,000 graduates this year and says AI tokenmaxxing is a ‘vanity metric’", "summary": "Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. announced the company plans to hire over 20,000 entry-level college graduates this year, pushing back against predictions that AI would eliminate white-collar jobs. Kumar dismissed token consumption as a \"vanity metric\" for measuring AI productivity, arguing that companies should instead focus on strategic deployment of AI within specific workflows. The hiring push comes as Cognizant introduces new AI-focused roles, including Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator, which do not require technical backgrounds.", "body_md": "For months, the loudest voices in artificial intelligence—including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s [Dario Amodei](https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/anthropic-ceo-warning-ai-job-loss/)—warned that entry-level white-collar jobs were headed for extinction. In recent weeks, [both have walked back those statements](https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walking-back-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prophecies-ipo/).\n\nAnd according to [Cognizant](https://fortune.com/company/cognizant-technology-solutions/) CEO [Ravi Kumar S.](https://fortune.com/article/congizant-ceo-ravi-kumar-ai-entry-level-jobs-liberal-arts-grads/), who oversees a workforce of more than 350,000 employees, the outcry wasn’t just a prediction gone wrong—it was fearmongering.\n\n“There was a little bit of fearmongering from reading about the fact that there’s going to be a collapse of jobs,” Kumar said at [ Fortune’s COO Summit ](https://conferences.fortune.com/event/Fortune-COO-Summit-2026/websitePage:fb7af5b4-ecbf-45da-aa7b-b3106fa42d03)in Scottsdale, Arizona on Monday. “I think there will be more jobs.”\n\nCognizant [hasn’t been immune to restructuring and layoffs](https://www.crn.com/news/ai/2026/cognizant-s-project-leap-270m-plan#:~:text=The%20Teaneck%2C%20N.J.%2Dbased%20company,based%20business%20news%20provider%20Moneycontrol.) as it works to transform for the AI era. But Kumar told *Fortune’s* executive editorial director [Diane Brady](https://fortune.com/author/diane-brady/) that the company hired 20,000 entry-level college graduates last year alone—and expects that number to grow in 2026.\n\nSome of those roles will likely fall under Cognizant’s new [AI Builder strategy](https://news.cognizant.com/2026-06-01-Cognizant-Develops-Frontier-Certified-Engineer-and-Frontier-Business-Operator-Roles-to-Define-the-Next-Generation-of-AI-Powered-Work), which introduces two new positions: Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator. And even though his company is focused in the tech world, candidates don’t need a technical background to qualify.\n\n“It could be a history major with skills to identify and use agentic work. It could be a biology major known as life sciences. It could be an HR accountant who can use agentic Claude terminals around them,” he said.\n\nThe workforce pyramid will begin to flatten, Kumar added, as there remains a need for both entry-level workers—as well as leaders to guide directions (he called the chief operations officer the most important role in any company). But in the middle, he said, is where AI will take charge.\n\n“AIs will be in the middle of a flow. You want to have a ton of jobs in the front, you will have a ton of jobs in the back,” he said. “These are going to be validation and verification jobs, and those are going to be authentication jobs. Now, when you have a flat-earth pyramid, the biggest challenge is the middle layers are going to be leaner.”\n\n## Cognizant’s CEO says tokenmaxxing has measured AI all wrong\n\nAs companies have raced to demonstrate AI productivity gains, many have turned to token consumption as their primary measuring stick. [Meta](https://fortune.com/company/facebook/), [Amazon](https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/amazon-tokenmaxxing-claude-ai-capex-meta-gil-luria/), and OpenAI are among those that have leaned on token metrics as an internal measure of productivity. Kumar thinks that’s the wrong approach.\n\n“For the last two years, how you consumed tokens, how much tokens you consumed was a vanity metric,” he said. “…I don’t think you should equate this to the number of paid hours. I don’t think you should equate this to productivity.”\n\nInstead, Kumar argued that knowing how and when to deploy tokenization strategically will become a discipline in its own right — one that individual teams will need to develop and refine based on their specific workflows and business goals.\n\n“It has to be grounded in the company’s hustle,” he said in the *Fortune* conversation titled “Great Restructuring: Rethinking Talent Strategy in the Age of AI.”\n\nThe broader shift, in Kumar’s view, is away from measuring inputs entirely: “We have to go from delivering projects, delivering billable hours, owning outcomes, and finally we have to underwrite those outcomes and be paid for those outcomes. I think that is the future. I believe we are going to reforge, and whoever reforges this future is going to be a winner on the other side.”\n\n**The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum** will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy,\n\n**Nov. 16-17 in Detroit.**", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cognizant-ceo-is-swimming-against-the-tide-on-ai-hes-hiring-over-20000-graduates", "canonical_source": "https://fortune.com/2026/06/01/cognizant-ceo-ravi-kumar-s-hiring-entry-level-tokenmaxxing-vanity-metric/", "published_at": "2026-06-01 23:40:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-02 22:15:07.417829+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Cognizant", "Ravi Kumar S.", "Sam Altman", "Dario Amodei", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Fortune"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cognizant-ceo-is-swimming-against-the-tide-on-ai-hes-hiring-over-20000-graduates", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cognizant-ceo-is-swimming-against-the-tide-on-ai-hes-hiring-over-20000-graduates.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cognizant-ceo-is-swimming-against-the-tide-on-ai-hes-hiring-over-20000-graduates.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cognizant-ceo-is-swimming-against-the-tide-on-ai-hes-hiring-over-20000-graduates.jsonld"}}