Finding Opportunity in Uncertainty

How Ravi Kumar is transforming IT firm Cognizant for the AI era

- GABRIEL SNYDER

GROWING UP IN INDIA, RAVI Kumar didn't look like leadership material. “I didn’t do well in school. I was at the bottom of my class,” he says. “Normally, when you're at the bottom, you're good at something like sports or art. I wasn’t good at anything.”

Yet, the academic underachiever would go on to excel in chemical engineering at Shivaji University, a solid but decidedly not elite state school. “Once I tasted success, the aspirations to punch above my weight grew,” Kumar says.

He eventually landed a coveted position at India’s prestigious Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, or BARC. There, working alongside graduates of elite institutions, Kumar discovered his potential. “I didn’t go to an IIT [Indian Institute of Technology], but I felt like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m able to compete with these guys,’” he says.

Today, he runs Cognizant, a $36 billion global technology company with nearly 350,000 employees.

Cognizant at the Crossroads

Founded in 1994 as an in-house technology unit of Dun & Bradstreet, Cognizant grew into a powerhouse in IT services by providing skilled technical labor in India—today, more than two-thirds of its employees are based there—to Western firms looking to outsource their technology operations. But after years of stellar growth, the company hit turbulence. In the months before Kumar's arrival as CEO, in January 2023, its stock had declined nearly 40 percent off its pandemic peak.

The challenges weren’t unique to Cognizant. The rise of AI threatened to upend decades-old business models. The entire IT services industry faced an existential question: What happens to a business built on human outsourcing when machines start writing code?