AiThority Interview with Rob Walker, President of Global Growth Markets at Cognizant

Hi Rob, welcome to the Interview Please tell us about your journey in the technology consulting industry.

“I joined Cognizant in the middle of the Covid lockdowns in early 2021 as Managing Director of the UK & Ireland business. My main focus then was on growing the company’s revenue across UK&I and investing in strong local leadership and talent. Since then, I have moved into the role of President, Global Growth Markets, in which I am responsible for growing our revenues outside of North America by bringing together Cognizant’s expertise across the globe to provide an enhanced service to our clients. As part of this role I get to lead over 86,000 associates around the world and create transformative experiences for our customers. Before Cognizant, I spent 24 years at EY, helping a wide range of clients improve the efficiency of their business with emerging technology and digital capabilities.”

You are among the leading influencers in the cloud and AI What inspired you to formulate a customer-driven partnership with Google Cloud?

“Cognizant has had a long-standing strategic alliance with Google Cloud. We made the decision to expand this relationship in 2021 by creating a dedicated Google Cloud Business Group to help accelerate shared clients’ cloud modernisation journeys across key vertical markets. Since then, we have been working closely together to offer innovative industry solutions for businesses of all sizes.

More recently, we have seen several breakthroughs in the world of Generative AI, which has become a huge disruptor in the technology world and undoubtedly has multiple benefits for businesses when implemented appropriately. So, our latest announcement with Google Cloud was the next logical next step in continuing our innovative work together. By using our existing capabilities and upskilling staff in this new dynamic area, we are aiming to play a key role in supporting the global shift to responsible AI use.”

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How would your partnership transform the way businesses work with AI technology?

“In their journey to full AI adoption, organisations face numerous challenges; from skill shortages, to implementation problems, to understanding where AI can truly have an impact on their businesses. The advent of generative AI has only added to the complexity of these challenges, and companies are quickly realising they need the support of technology partners to help them navigate the AI world.

That’s why we’re working to upskill 25,000 Cognizant employees via the Cognizant Google Cloud Academy, a training program which will also be available for our customers, and open new innovation hubs to collaborate on AI projects. It means our teams will be well placed to accelerate business’ adoption of AI, by making it simpler for clients to create, migrate, and modernise their AI journeys. Cognizant will be working towards building a number of transformative solutions across industries, starting with banking, insurance, life sciences and retail.

How are AI journeys influencing business operations?

“Generative AI has huge potential to create meaningful business value: for example, the right use of applications like natural language processing tools can help employees streamline how they work, create new customer experience and use data more efficiently. However, it can be difficult for companies to cut through the noise and understand where new technology like this can really add value.

Cognizant and Google Cloud’s partnership will accelerate businesses’ journey to adopt generative AI in meaningful areas of the organisation where they see real results, quickly. With more highly skilled experts, companies of all sizes in financial services, healthcare, retail and life sciences will be able to focus on creating business value and applying Google Cloud technology to make the most of their existing assets.”

Could you highlight some of the best examples of AI-powered digital journeys that Cognizant has been part of?

“A few weeks ago, Cognizant announced that we had expanded our relationship with Nike to manage its global technology operations. In addition to the activities Cognizant has already been supporting Nike with for over 14 years, we will help drive exceptional technology experience for their customers as well as over 70,000 employees. The expanded focus covers three key areas of Nike’s tech operations: application and infrastructure support, deskside and dispatch depot, and multilingual IT customer service.

Beyond this Cognizant has a long history of helping companies with their AI needs. Working with businesses from the life sciences, retail and healthcare sector, Cognizant’s AI teams have enabled AI-guided decisions in areas such as price optimisation, predictive healthcare analytics and crop science optimisation.”

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In the era of AI and automation, do you think companies would look out for key partners to meet the demands of Responsible AI and Trustworthy AI?

“Definitely. The journey towards AI adoption was already complicated enough for businesses before generative AI became so readily available, and now more than ever, organisations are in need of reliable partners to support their implementation of responsible and trustworthy AI.

With the technology expected to continue evolving at its current speed, as outlined in Cognizant’s Responsible AI principles, businesses will need to think beyond cybersecurity and data privacy commitments to additionally create an AI culture that strives towards accountability and minimising bias. This is essential not only to stay in line with the developing regulations but moreover to build trust with stakeholders, employees and customers alike.

Onboarding a partner can mean businesses get integral guidance to navigate these new challenges and ultimately get to their objectives faster, be it discovering new business innovation methods through AI, creating differentiated customer and employee experiences or improving their time to market at enterprise scale.”

Please tell us about the tech talent development resources that you have created for Google Cloud and other customers? What are your observations from the job market associated with AI and data science skills?

“It is no secret that the technology industry has a talent shortage. This has held up many companies in their digital transformation programmes, as they simply cannot find the talent resource they need to make the most of new technology. Through this partnership with Google Cloud, an extra 25,000 Cognizant employees will be upskilled to better understand and make the most of generative AI. Courses will include a wide range of topics from introduction to AI fundamentals, to advanced courses on specific sets of AI solutions.

Our objective is to be proactive in fulfilling future demand for this kind of talent and build a workforce that is ready to use innovative tech tools across the world. As a result, the barrier to entry for many firms will be lowered as they make use our expertise and guidance to implement this new technology and supplement in-house teams. This will put less pressure on customers to bring in tech talent they can’t afford to find, whilst still allowing them to make the most of Google Cloud’s latest generative AI tools, including large language models and Gen App Builder.

As the technology becomes more common and integrated into the everyday operations of businesses, we are expecting to see a significant demand for AI maintenance and management related positions. This provides opportunity for existing and prospective tech employees to differentiate themselves as businesses are looking to cover a lack of in-house domain knowledge.”

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What are your predictions on the future of Generative AI and how it would offer a broad range of alternatives to enterprise organizations as well as startups in the Business Analytics domains:

“With the technology progressing so quickly, pinpointing what the future for generative AI holds are merely informed expectations. What is certain is that there is significant potential in AI- human collaboration.

Recently we launched our Cognizant Neuro AI platform which allows our clients to accelerate their adoption of AI and create AI-embedded applications to solve their business challenges. We see incredible opportunity for businesses to utilise the technology continuously innovate their operations to drive cost efficiencies, resilience and business revenue, and differentiate themselves as their market and needs evolve. AI will certainly be a key defining factor of competitiveness – while startups can leverage the technology to scale quickly and challenge the status quo, established businesses must embrace AI without delay to keep their operations modern and future-ready.

As generative AI becomes more prevalent and all-encompassing, enterprises will face various obstacles such as selecting the right options in the market, solving complex cross-functional integration needs, and anticipating new categories of risk that require adequate guard rails and management. Therefore, to capture the full picture and truly scale, enterprises will need a clear roadmap for their AI adoption and sophisticated AI management capabilities.”

Thank you, Rob ! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.