How one company sees AI expand opportunity for American workers

2026-09-15T07:01:00

(BPT) – During this time of major technological upheaval and uncertainty, many have concerns about what the AI evolution means for the U.S. job market. For leading AI Builder and technology services provider Cognizant, the key to growing the economy lies in focusing on the American worker. In fact, the company’s research finds that AI could unlock $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor productivity and $1 trillion in additional U.S. economic value over the next decade.

“We believe AI will create significantly more jobs than it displaces, and shifts greater value, wages and accountability to the frontlines of America’s workforce,” said Ravi Kumar S, CEO of Cognizant. “The opportunity now is to build those pathways quickly, so American workers and enterprises capture that value first.”

Building on that belief, Cognizant is taking steps to ensure that more U.S. jobs — and job training — is in line with the needs of the future.

Hiring new college grads for the AI era

This year, Cognizant is hiring 1,500 U.S. college graduates from across the country to fill newly created AI-era jobs in the company.

To find these new employees, Cognizant is drawing on partnerships with the University of Georgia, Arizona State University and the University of Kentucky, as well as its role as a national program sponsor of registered apprenticeships with the U.S. Department of Labor.

“We’re hiring American graduates and standing up new American job categories specifically for the AI era,” added Kumar.

The new roles the company has created and is currently hiring for include Frontier Certified Engineer (FCE) and Frontier Business Operator (FBO), which are both part of Cognizant’s AI-era professional job family.

• FCEs work directly with client organizations to reimagine and realign business processes for today’s AI-enabled environment. FCEs will specialize in rethinking how work gets done, identifying where AI can reshape operations, eliminate friction and create lasting competitive advantage. The FCE role requires both strategic thinking and technical fluency, making it one of the most consequential pivot points into the AI-era workforce.
• FBOs take an equally critical approach. Tasked with taking full ownership of operational results, they’ll manage a blended workforce of human and digital labor including deploying AI agents, automation and human judgment in concert to drive business outcomes.

More simply put: Where Frontier Certified Engineers redesign the map, Frontier Business Operators navigate it in real time.

Cognizant is building a leading enterprise AI implementation position among frontier AI providers, and American workers trained in these roles get direct access to the tools defining the AI era. Cognizant holds more than 15,000 Claude certifications, the most of any Anthropic partner globally, and 5,000 Codex certifications, as one of a small group of global OpenAI Codex partners while Google Cloud is expanding its Gemini Enterprise partnership with Cognizant around Frontier Certified Engineers and scaled client execution.

Just how effective is Frontier AI capability?

The company’s new approach and groundbreaking roles are already delivering impressive measurable results for real-world clients. A Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator pod recently reimagined a large food-service company’s account-management workflow into 17 production AI agents.

The result? The effort reclaimed roughly 11 hours per account manager each week.

Committing to the future

In addition to creating, hiring and training for new roles to meet the moment, Cognizant has joined RAISE US, a new bipartisan national coalition. Ravi Kumar S sits on its Advisory Board alongside leaders from Amazon, Anthropic, Bank of America, IBM, Microsoft and the OpenAI Foundation.

Furthering its commitment to training the workforce of the future, Cognizant’s global Synapse skilling initiative has already surpassed its original goal of training one million people a full year ahead of schedule, prompting the company to double its ambition to train two million people by 2030.

“The AI economy will be built by people who know how to work with AI, not by AI alone,” said Kumar. “Cognizant is proving that at scale, in American classrooms, on American campuses and inside American statehouses, and we intend to keep leading.”

Learn more about how Cognizant intends to help grow the technology workforce through direct investment in the American training infrastructure at Cognizant.ai.