Cognizant Technology Solutions 2026 Truist Technology Symposium

Arvind, thank you for hosting me. Look, the first principles of the tech services industry have to be reforged because this is a very different tech disruption. Let me tell you what that reforging means and what we have done at Cognizant. The first and foremost, this is a business which is no longer going to be about human capital. It's going to be about human and digital labor coming together to deliver a tech-led transformation. Tech-led transformation for companies like ours was about building systems. In the '90s, we built custom bespoke systems, then we became a system integrator for classical software. Then we actually became a services player for technology and software which was on the cloud and the plumbing was on the tap and the building was done by us. Fast-forward now, I think this is a technology which is action-oriented. It mimics human labor. A lot of what we are seeing today is productivity-led.

Still, we've not got to a point where we do new things in new ways. We're doing old things in new ways. The first and foremost, the first reforging of the first principles is we make the execution of this technology not just into systems but also business operations of companies. This market was $1 trillion before building systems at a time when enterprises were globalizing. This market now is $6 trillion because you actually have a total addressable spend around business operations of companies, and you do it embedded with digital labor. So that's the first reforging of the first principles of this industry. The second reforging of the first principles of this industry is you go more to an outcome-based business.

Enterprises across the world no longer want to buy software and no longer want to buy services separately. They want to bundle this and own. They don't want to own the agency of outcomes. They want to transition this to a provider who can do that. The third is it's going to be a platforms plus services business, which I believe is something we've been doing for years now. In 2017, we bought this company called TriZetto, and now we manage 200 million lives of insured healthcare in the United States. Platforms, human plus digital labor, outcomes-driven are the reforging of the first principles. If we reforge this, we see a bigger market than ever before. It's no longer a $3 trillion market, it's a $5 trillion market.

If you don't reforge it, you just end up doing software engineering, which then means you're doing it in the old way and you're going to deflate that model. But if you expand yourself into the business operations of companies, it's a 6x opportunity.

So in 2024 and 2025, I would say it was the first chapter of AI, much more broad-based. It wasn't as nuanced. We dug a hole and a basement with the same machine. Most of it, the world is in a flattish growth trajectory. A lot of it was productivity-led. We kind of swapped wallet share to transfer the productivity to clients. If you could do that efficiently, you could actually win more wallet share with clients. It doesn't mean new spend cycles, existing spend cycles done more efficiently. That's what happened in the first wave. I would say later part of last year, we saw a second swim lane triggering off. That second swim lane was doing old things in new ways. Say, for example, for a large telecom client in Asia Pacific, we are migrating their mainframe into public cloud.

The idea of doing that is you could take the MIPS down, a line of code in COBOL used to cost $10 to refactor. Now it costs $1.50 to refactor. You transition that to public cloud, and the money actually gets refactored from a different spend pool to services as well as to cloud providers. It's actually old things being done in new ways. Recently, we set up a campaign for a frontier finance organization. In this swim lane, it's not new discretionary spend cycles, it's old spend cycles reorganized to give us momentum and a runway. Frontier finance is the ability to run your finance function using a frontier first model. Every Fortune 500 CFO spends 70% of their effort and time on controls and 20%-30% on growth.

If you can flip it, you could actually orient finance towards growth, you could orient finance towards more real time, and you could power a finance function which is driven on growth imperatives rather than controls. Again, you take an old thing, it is done in a different way, and you do it in a new way. One of my favorite campaigns in recent times is pharmacovigilance or drug safety. I have four deals now where we have drug safety, which is called pharmacovigilance. We compete with clinical research organizations to win that business. We used to do a small sliver of work, which is mostly contact center driven. And now we could own the end-to-end cycle and deliver better insights, faster lifecycle, faster shrinking the speed at which you could do drug safety at a lower cost. This is a spend cycle our clients were already having.

They were not just having it with us. They were doing it with clinical research organizations. How do I make a function frontier-led and create a new spend cycle for us versus the clients are still spending in the same way? This is a swim lane which has got activated, and it is creating significant traction. You layer it with the consolidation, then you layer it on top of it with old things in new ways. And then doing new things in new ways, which kind of cater to growth imperatives of organizations. For example, for a wealth management firm in the U.S., we are building agentic work around their independent wealth advisors and actually deliver more capability to those wealth advisors who are actually on a subscription model with this company. So it is a new discretionary spend cycle.