Cognizant at Citi’s Conference: AI Strategies and Market Expansion

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp (NASDAQ:CTSH) presented its strategic vision at Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. The discussion, led by Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, highlighted Cognizant’s focus on AI-driven growth and market expansion. While the company is optimistic about its AI strategies, it also faces challenges in adapting to a rapidly evolving IT services market.

Key Takeaways

• Cognizant is prioritizing AI in three vectors: unlocking productivity, industrializing AI, and agentification, with the latter two expected to drive future growth.
• The company is actively pursuing large and mega deals, aiming to strengthen its position in underpenetrated markets like healthcare and aerospace.
• Cognizant’s pricing models are shifting towards a hybrid approach, integrating digital and physical workforces.
• The integration of Belcan is progressing well, enhancing Cognizant’s capabilities in aerospace and defense.
• Cognizant is exploring M&A opportunities to access new markets and expand geographically.

Financial Results

• Large deals increased to 29 in 2024, up from 17, but saw a decline in the first half of 2025 with 10 deals compared to 13 in the previous year.
• The second quarter saw a rebound in small deals, driven by discretionary spending in financial services and insurance sectors.

Operational Updates

• Cognizant has consistently secured 4-6 deals worth over $100 million each quarter over the past three years.
• The company is targeting mega deals, valued at $500 million or more, to drive growth.
• Efforts are underway to expand platforms like TriZetto into adjacent markets such as healthcare and insurance.
• Internal service lines supporting data, infrastructure, cloud, and digital engineering are growing faster than the company average, indicating potential in industrializing AI.

Future Outlook

• Cognizant anticipates that vectors 2 and 3, focusing on industrializing AI and agentification, will outpace vector 1 in growth, leading to significant opportunities.
• The company plans to double down on large deals, address capability gaps, and return to the "winner’s circle."
• Evolving pricing models will incorporate hybrid digital and physical workforce strategies, focusing on value and outcomes.

Q&A Highlights

• AI adoption is seen as crucial across three vectors, with clients expecting productivity gains to be reinvested into further projects.
• Cognizant is adapting its pricing models from traditional to hybrid, emphasizing value and outcomes.
• The company is considering expanding TriZetto into the insurance market, including property and casualty, and life insurance sectors.

In conclusion, Cognizant’s strategic focus on AI and market expansion positions it for potential growth, despite the challenges of a dynamic IT services landscape. Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference:

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Citi’s tech conference, and I’m Brian Keene. I cover the IT services sector here. We’re excited to have Cognizant here, and and we have head of Americas, Sarea Ghumadi, who’s going to help us understand what’s happening in the IT services market and especially with Cognizant. So with that, Saree, thanks for being here.

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: You know, I guess I wanted to just kick off and think about the the bigger landscape, and we’re obviously in dynamic times here. So maybe you could help us characterize the IT services market from your point in The Americas looking back the last couple of years and getting to today and how you see it going forward.

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Yeah. So, you know, good afternoon, everyone. You know, the AI has disrupted almost every single value chain, every single market across the planet in the last two years or so. So we have seen the evolution of AI across the sectors. And, currently, you know, at Cognizant, we have characterized the AI market opportunity in three steps or three vectors as we call it.

The first step, the clients are leveraging AI to unlock productivity in their value chains or in their estate. And the next step after they do that is to infuse AI across their tech stack to reduce their tech debt and, you know, to start agentifying. The third step in the process is deploying agents and agentifying the value chain. As we see right now, the demand is more in the vector one, which is almost every single client is focused on deploying AI to unlock productivity, to drive efficiencies, and to drive cost optimization. As a result, there are number of cost optimization place or there are many cost optimization deals in the market today.

But we expect this to evolve into vector two, which is industrialization of AI, which is infusing AI across the value chain as we progress over the next few quarters, and then eventually into the agentification. And we strongly believe that the market opportunity in vector two, which is industrializing AI and agentification, it’s far more than what we are seeing right now in the vector one. That’s how I would characterize the broad market today that we are in.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Yeah. So I guess, you know, before we we jump to my next question, when when do we get to more scale in AI where we see it visibly in the revenues

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Yeah.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: For the revenue growth? Is that gonna be a couple years before we get to vector two in in size, or can vector one be enough?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: No. No. No. Vector one is already in play. Almost every single client that we work with have deployed AI in some shape or the form to unlock productivity, you know, drive efficiencies, to drive cost optimization.

Now we are already beginning to see the vector two opportunities, which is, you know, industrializing AI, infusing AI across the tech stack. Let me break that down vector let me break down break that vector two into two or three parts. The first step in the vector two is the data layer, where we will have to get the data layer ready for the AI deployment and consumption, which includes getting the LLMs, SLMs, DOG, and stuff like that. After you do that, the next step will be the compute layer. You have to modernize your cloud and the infrastructure and things like that.

Then comes the digital engineering layer, which is, you know, building the native AI applications. So right now, clients are beginning to work across all three, data, the infrastructure, and cloud. There’s cloud and the digital engineering. And even at Cognizant, if you look at our internal, service lines, the the service lines that support data, infrastructure, and cloud, and digital engineering are far growing faster than company average, which shows which shows that vector t two opportunities are beginning to emerge. Yeah.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Obviously, with Ravi’s tenure and large deals has been a key focus, and I think I think you run a lot of the large deal stuff. I think large deals were up 29 in Yeah. Deals in 2024, and that was up from 17. The ’25, though, I have large deals at 10 versus 13 in the first half twenty four. So has some momentum stalled in the large deal based on what you’re seeing in The Americas?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: No. Not really. So first of all, large deals has been focus focus area for Cognizant for the last three years. We have, overall the, you know, large deal engine. We have built surround around it.

You know, we have built a support system around it. And we also have strengthened our execution muscle for the large deals. So in in historically, over the last few quarters, we have been winning four to six large deals each quarter consistently. And sometimes these large deals tend to get lumpy. So for example, in the last quarter, we announced $2,000,000,000 deals in the same quarter because it just so happened that sales cycle spanned out that way.

So it might come across as if it is, a bit lumpy in, you know, few quarters because that’s the nature of the large deals. But we are very confident and we are, of our pipeline in the large deals. And as I said, we have been winning four to six large deals consistently each quarter. These are $100,000,000 plus deals. And we are we will continue to focus on structure and go after mega deals too.

And when I say mega deals, these are $500,000,000 plus deals or a billion dollar plus deals.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: And then we did see a bounce back in small deals in the second quarter. Can you just talk about are we seeing that that pickup in discretionary work in The Americas, or is that too early?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: No. It is, it is both. There are certain sectors where we are definitely seeing a pickup in the discretionary spend on our deals. And case in point, pick being the financial services and the insurance segment where, we are seeing green shoots or the demand pickup in the small projects and the discretionary spend. And but when we look at other markets, I mean, for example, in the health care, I get there health care continues to be a little cautious because it’s a tale of two cities across payers, providers, and biopharma medical devices.

Payers and providers are cautious watching, you know, the government spending dynamic across Medicare and Medicaid sectors. And, whereas life sciences companies are a little more cautious on the in the broader trade and, tariff situation. As a result, spending in health care still continues to remain cautious. And in the products and resources, which includes retail, manufacturing, logistics, utilities, and not utilities, the the hospitality segments, they are more impacted by the trade, the trade anxiety. They have more anxiety related to the macroeconomic dynamics.

So there, we see a bit of congestion in the small deals and, you know, spend. And there is no significant departure, in the, you know, discretionary spend in communications and media and tech to where we were one or two quarters ago. So it’s not uniform across. There are certain sectors like financial services and insurance where we are seeing the uptick. There are certain sectors that remain cautious.

There are certain section sectors that are still congested, and, it’s kind of, it’s all over the place there.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Yeah. So I guess taking those two sectors, the health care sector and financial services, both have kind of reversed their growth rates. I guess, why is that? And then and then what’s the outlook for growth in those financial services and health care in particular? For Cognizant, you mean.

Yeah. For for you guys in America. Exactly. I

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: mean, both financial services and health care have been our largest businesses for many years. And let’s talk about financial services. This has been our largest business unit for many years. And over the past several years, I think, you know, we had no did not perform, that well in financial services for two reasons. One is the market there are the macroeconomic issues or the macro market issues.

And second was we had our own Cognizant centric structural issues when it came to financial services. So over the last two or three years, we have addressed our Cognizant inherent structural issues. So when I say that so we have, you know, brought in the focus at subsegment level in financial services. Earlier, financial services was all lumped as one unit. So we have broken that down into several units to bring in the subsegment wise focus.

We have infused the fresh leadership team into the mix, and we have aligned well with the market. So we have aligned well. Our strategy is in financial services is now well aligned with the market, you know, in terms of solutions that we offer and things like that. As a result of all of this, we saw a good rebound in financial services segment after many years. Actually, for the, if I’m not wrong, the last four consecutive quarters, have delivered year on year growth in financial services segment.

And we feel good about it now that, as I said, that since we feel we are seeing green shoots and discretionary spend coming back in financial services, I feel good about that side. Health care has been our, you know, strongest business, if I say, for a long time because we serve the entire continuum in health care. We serve the entire nine yards. We serve payers. We serve providers.

We serve biopharma, medical devices. It’s just not that. We also have our own platforms for the health care market, the TriZetto suite of platforms. And, it’s a privilege and honor for me to say that Trizetto platforms cover two thirds of US insured population across two thirds of US roughly roughly two thirds of US insured population. Well so that’s that’s a huge, responsibility on us to improve the health of communities that we live in.

So, with this kind of, you know, deep and domain expertise in health care, we we, our solutions and, you know, our go to market offerings in health care continue to remain strong. So I think we’re gonna build on our platform, strength. We are expanding our platforms into our adjacencies, into provider market in the health care space. So we we continue to feel strong and good about our health care business.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Got it. Looking back at the March Analyst Day, I know you highlighted five areas of focus for for the Americas portfolio. Two of those areas I wanted to ask about were the un underpenetrated markets and then industry leading platforms. Can you just help us understand those two levers and how there might be some upside potential?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Yes. Sure. You know, Cognizant, operates in form of four broader markets, is financial services, health, communications, media, and tech and products and resources, which includes retail manufacturing and things like that. Underneath these broad market segments, there are certain subsegments that Cognizant never participated in or Cognizant is light. We did not we are underpenetrated.

You know, some of those examples of underpenetrated segments are like health care provider. While we are extremely strong and deep in health care, we are little relatively light in provider segment, which is underpenetrated for us. Same thing with communications and media. While we are present, but we are not present to the extent that we want to. And there are certain market segments like aerospace and defense, oil and gas, where Cognizant never participated in that market in the past.

So as a strategy earlier this year, we have identified some of these sub segments within these broad markets where we would want to double down on and where we would want to focus more on. So we have executed on provider and communications and media and tech. So we have added more talent. We have strengthened our offerings in that segment. We have enhanced our go to market teams in those segments.

So we are executing well on the plan that we had for both provider and communications and media. On aerospace and defense, last year, as you all know, we have made an acquisition of Belcan, which directly provides us access to aerospace and defense market. It not only provides access to aerospace and defense market, it also helps us strengthen our engineering muscle. So that we we plan to address. So we will continue to address, our underpenetrated market segments and the market segments where we do not have presence today either through building solutions in house or looking at, you know, acquisition opportunities or both.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Got it. Got it. Wanted to ask about the platform piece of that strategy and and how you guys are gonna price that and and and if you’re seeing any traction there. Right.

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: I mean, you know, in as as we spoke about our health care platforms, for example, in in the TriZetto suite. Yeah. Yeah. So we are trying to double down on our platform strategy in the health care market because we have the relevant platforms there. We are trying to expand into adjacent markets, leveraging our platforms.

We’re trying to expand Tricyto into health care provider, and we are also trying to expand Tricyto. We’re considering expanding Tricyto into insurance market, property and casualty Yep. Life insurance market. So we are exploring opportunities in in both ways. And in provider, I think, know, we have built prior authorization applications around our platform.

We have connected our platform to the clearinghouse. So the strategy there is to wherever we have platforms, we want to expand into adjacencies. In the markets that we do not have platforms, we will continue to look for the right asset to, you know you know, acquire a platform or into that market segment. And by the way, this is outside of the AI related platforms that we talk about, our newer suite of platforms and things like that. Those are more AI related plot platforms that are broader across the markets.

Yeah. And the platforms like Tricyto are more domain centric platforms. So we are focused on both.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Got it. So, obviously, we’ve we’ve talked a little bit about the elephant in the room AI. As you know, talking to everybody in the halls, there’s a big debate on Yeah. You know, where is AI, and what’s it going to mean for for IT services. You know, the big the big question and pushback we always hear is, is it the IT service vendor gonna have to give up productivity gains as the corporation is is serving and generating?

And then and then, obviously, you serve and generate less revenue versus the old model, which was head count based. You know, 30% of code is now AI generated, which you guys talk about. But the fear, obviously, is that’s just going to be less revenue generated from Cognizant. Can you just help us understand? That’s Yeah.

That’s the the bare thesis that everybody’s worried about and how that, you know, doesn’t hold water. Yeah. So I think as I articulated earlier, we see AI opportunity in three vectors, as

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: I said. And right now, the vector one, which is the productivity unlocking, is where the maximum focus and attention is across in the market. When we execute projects in vector one, yes, clients expect the productivity back. Some of the productivity savings or most of the productivity that we unlock in the vector one is passed back to the clients. But the way the Cognizant is addressing that issue is when we unlock the productivity in an estate for a client, we backfill that we backfill that by two means.

Either we go back to the client and we articulate that we can burn burn down more of inventory for the same cost, or we can do more for the same, or we can leverage the funds that are unlocked to do some of the additional projects. That is one way to backfill the productivity part of it. On top of it on top of it, when we proactively or reactively go to clients, we also build a broader solution around consolidation. So we make a pitch for consolidation to say that, you know, we’ll not only unlock the productivity in our estate, we’ll also unlock the productivity in the surround if you give us an opportunity. So that that helps us, a, retain our base of estate and grow on top of it.

So that way, I think, you know, there is I I I strongly believe there is still certain amount of growth in the productivity vector. On top of it, when you transition to vector two and vector three, these are there is tremendous amount of opportunity there, which which which remains untapped. So we are broadly speaking right now at Cognizant. We have, you know we started speaking about pivot from SDLC to ADLC, software development life cycle to agent development life cycle, there is humongous opportunity, you know, across in the vector to across data compute and the application layer where you’ll have to where as a service providers or as SI firms are needed or will be required to help clients build those agents across as you pivot from SDLC to ADLC. And the surface area of ADLC will be much higher than SDLC as the agent to use user ratio business user ratio is much higher compared to the traditional software.

So we see that there is a tremendous opportunity in vector two, and vector three is agentification. As I said, we already see, you know, some of the projects emerging in both vector two and vector three. And we believe the growth rates of vector two and vector three will be far higher than what we are seeing in the vector one. Yep. So they will outgrow to give away to give the breakaway growth opportunities for firms like Cognizant.

And, we see those evolving right now, and the market is evolving into vector two and vector three.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: How do we think about the the as AI evolves and we get into vectors one you know, in one and then now two and three, how do we think about the pricing models? You know, traditionally, it’s been a a time and material headcount model, but now we’re gonna have to move more to productivity output based in different kinda platform based models. How do

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: you think about that transition? So the the pricing models will evolve over a period of time. You’re right. Actually, historically, we have been consistently pricing at the time and material or fixed rate, and so so in some cases, outcome based. From there, we pivot now we’ll have to pivot now to a hybrid pricing model where you have a digital workforce, digital agents, and a physical workforce, and then where you would have to price for value, price for outcomes with risk baked in.

So these pricing models will evolve. As we started, you know, doing some of these large deals with vector two and vector three components involved in it, so we are already, you know, you know, working on some of those pricing models at Cognizant where we pivot more towards value, outcome driven, hybrid with digital workforce and physical workforce and things like that. You know,

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: the other pushback we hear is that that there’s a lot of internal resources that people wanna do their their Gen AI in house, they don’t wanna outsource to other vendors. Are you seeing that in in the marketplace that there’s a little bit of a, you know, we don’t wanna commoditize our data out to others. We want it internally only. No. Actually, I don’t see that.

That there was a discussion around that two or three quarters ago.

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: But now I think, the clients have gotten over that because now if you have to deploy AI at scale across enterprise. So, you know, they they they need participation of service providers to in that market.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Can you talk about just in the in vector two and and and three, in your crystal ball, which, you know, it’s gonna be difficult. But when when do we see in the horizon in the pipeline, when do you see that becoming as you said, it’s vector two and three are gonna be more material Right. For you guys. But when when does that happen? Is that six months, twelve months?

Are we still three years away from those vectors to really hit it? No. As I I don’t I know. Actually, as I said, in vector two, we participate through three service lines within Cognizant,

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: the data, the cloud, and the digital engineering. All those three subsegments of service lines in Cognizant are growing much faster than the company average, which indicates which indicates that the opportunity in vector two is already taking off. It’s already taking off. I mean, to predict when it reaches its peak, it’s a little, you know, hard to, you know, articulate at this point in time. But we strongly believe that vector two is taking off right now because we are seeing those opportunities and the subsegments within opposite Cognizant that support or that, you know, serve those vector vector two are growing much faster than they have Cognizant tablet.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: So what what’s holding back Cognizant and other IT service companies from growing back to high single digits to low double digits, the industry, let’s say, because you’re seeing depressed growth rates. You you see positive commentary from management teams, but the numbers don’t reflect the positive commentary. Yeah. When did those two things align where we can see the organic growth be back to at or above the previous, you know, growth rate? See, right now, the whole market is, I would say, more concentrated on vector one.

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Vector one is more of a consolidation play or more of optimization play or cost optimization or consolidation with, you know, unlocking productivity and driving efficiencies as a hedge. So the that vector, you know, is because you’re compressing the market to certain extent, and providers like us are trying to expand by consolidation. So that’s why I think you see the growth rates that you’re seeing in the market today. Yeah. Once we pivot to vector two and vector three, I think, you know, we should start, you know vector two and vector three are expected to grow at a much faster rate than vector one.

Yep. And when that happens, the market should pivot back to the growth rates that you just mentioned. But when, whether it is two quarters from now, three quarters from now, I mean, it depends on a lot of other macro dynamics that we’re dealing with today in the market too. Yeah. Once vector one is consolidated, I think now the vector two continues the trajectory that it is on right now.

I expect it to progress, you know, swiftly from there, barring all things being equal on the the the macroeconomic dynamics ease a little.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: So as as head of Americas, how much visibility do you have in in the pipeline, in deal signings, in the revenue trajectory? Is it is it still pretty macro sensitive, so, you know, only three months that you can really know for sure, or or is there enough of a pipeline that you can see it out six to nine months?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: I mean, these segments are specific again. So for example, in segments like financial services and health care, we have relatively more visibility. For segments like products and resources, which are very dependent, which is retail manufacturing and the group, which are very heavily, you know, impacted or, you know, by tariffs and the trade situation. I think they they have have relatively less visibility. Their focus is more on short term.

But as the sectors which are kind of relatively more confident, relatively more insulated from the macro dynamics, we have a long term view.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Got it. In The Americas, can you just talk about the the overall company’s focus on margins, guidance, and their ambition to improve margins? How does how does you know, obviously, America is a big percent of revenue. So you you’re obviously a big part of that. Can you talk about what you’re doing to to lever the margin?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: I mean, always the focus is growing revenue and at a healthier margin or at a at a relatively good margin. So that has always been the focus, and that will continue to be the focus. We’re doing wide variety of things. For example, when we as I said, we not only strengthened our large deal sales part of it, we also have strengthened the large deal execution part of it so that we stay on track on bid versus bid. So we have rigorous governance processes within to make sure that we are delivering, you know, on bid and to make sure our bid versus date is the right place because we have unprecedented focus on large deals.

So we continue to do that. That’s one thing that we are, you know, rigorously executing on that. The second thing, you know, that we have executed next gen at Cognizant as you you all know, and we continue to see, you know, the benefits of that. And, we will continue to remain focused as this market evolves and as this pivots to AI on the revenue per resource and the traditional levers like pyramid optimization, global delivery, and things like. So we’ll continue to execute on the traditional levers.

We will continue to focus and execute rigorous rigorously on a large deal governance, large deal delivery, and execution. And we will kind of, continue to look for other levers to make sure that we grow revenue at the right margins.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Where’s the market and pricing right now? And I think competitively, if if demands, you know, discretionary spend is lower and if if it’s just discretionary or if it’s, you know, the productivity that’s that’s driving a lot of it, you would think that vendors were still gonna be super aggressive on price in order to win any business at all. So is there any is there any upside to pricing? I mean, I’m sure there’s upside, but is there is there any signs of of that pricing is stabilized at least? Yeah.

The pricing market the pricing scenario in vector one continues to remain highly competitive because it’s more

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: of a productivity play, and it is a little more, you know, competitive than what it used to be a year ago, I would call in vector one. Yeah. But as you pivot to vector two and vector three, where specialized skills are needed, you know, specialized special folks. Because in vector two, you not only need tech technology progress, you also need domain, you need context, you need relevance to the client environments. There, we you know, it I expect the pry pricing to be a little more premium.

Right. And the pricing to evolve from where we are in the vector one, which is highly competitive. So the in vector well,

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: the moment you transition to vector two and vector three, you know, there’ll be premium pricing in those segments. So how do you guys compete versus your main competitors in vector two and three?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: In terms of pricing, you mean?

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: No. In just terms of win rate or or or experience that you pitch to the table when you’re, you know, pitching it to?

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: So I think it’s thank you for asking that. You know, our unique differentiator when it comes to vector two and vector three is how we bring together three or four key dimensions, which is a deep domain expertise in the markets that we serve, like health care, financial services, and other segments. Combine that with our client context. We have Cognizant historically had deep partnership with select few clients that we have served. Combine that with the deep domain expertise, with the context the context of the client that we have, along with the, you know, the investments and the and the AI that we have made in the last one and a half, two years.

I think we were the one of the first few players to pledge a billion dollars. We have invested a lot in building the last mile infrastructure. We have invested a lot in strengthening the AI muscle across the firm. So we bring these three or four entities together, our AI capability and strength, combine that with our deep domain expertise and the client context, which is very important in the vector two and vector three. Along with technology, you need to know the client context to identify the value chains.

That is gonna be our unique differentiator for Cognizant.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: I wanna ask you about m and a, and I know we’re running out of time. But I have to ask you about the culture of Cognizant since, you know, Saria, you’ve been there a few years, one or two, but I think you started originally as a fresher originally.

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Yes. Yes.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: So so you have a a huge history. I’ve I’ve covered Cognizant for many years, but you have me beat. I’m interested in in we could go back a lot of years here, but maybe over the last five to seven years and then the transitions that happened with the new CEOs with Brian coming in and now Ravi. And where are we culturally at Cognizant? And you’ve seen a lot of different regimes.

So I’m just interested to get your perspective.

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: So this is I just completed twenty five years at Cognizant. I you’re right. Thanks. I just I joined Cognizant, you know, as a fresher, and Cognizant was a startup in many ways. Yeah.

So I have seen the evolution of Cognizant, growth of Cognizant, hyper growth of Cognizant, the next phase of Cognizant, and now the resurgence of Cognizant.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: So I

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: have seen it all. See, the one thing that remained constant across all these eras is the client centricity, which we call it as the DNA of Cognizant. That or you can call it as a culture of Cognizant. We Cognizant was built on client centricity, and we continue to be very client centric and client focused. And that is one of our unique differentiators.

Even if you ask our clients to tell something that is different for Cognizant, they would name today even today. That is one thing. Over the last, you know, five or seven years, I think, yes, there was a few transitions. But, you know, now the business is more stable. So, actually, if if we look at the first phase of Cognizant, I think since we grew as a startup and we went through the hyper growth phase and things like that, So we were more of a we still carried that startup mentality.

We were a large, small company in many ways. And so the pendulum was completely on one side when it came to the agility, decentralization, and things like that. The next phase, when the brand set out, we were trying to correct that to get to the right point. But, unfortunately, we swung it a little completely on the opposite side. So that’s when clients started seeing us as more rigid, tough to work with, highly process, you know, very rigid on processes and things like that.

Now with Ravi coming in, we are trying to bring the pendulum back to the middle. And ever since Ravi has come, we said the focus for Cognizant is gonna be growth. It’s not change. It’s growth. So that’s when we said we’re gonna double down on large deals.

We want to get it back to the winner’s circle. We want to fill our capability gaps. So it was all around growth growth, and growth. Yeah. So I think, you know, we have executed on that really well.

And for someone who has been here for twenty six years, I feel, you know, I feel, you know, the Cognizant’s culture is still intact. Yeah. And, to me, even after twenty five years, I still feel that, today morning when I woke up, I feel that this is my first day at work. So I feel as excited as I was back then. So I feel Yeah.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: That’s great. I know we only got about sixty seconds here. So wanted to ask about how Belcon is doing organically because I know it was

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Yeah.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: There was some issue there. You guys had called out. So how is that doing organically? And then any other m and a assets that you guys might be adding here? Because I think it’s $500,000,000 available to invest

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: Belcan is, well, the integration of Belcan into Cognizant is on track. And the Belcan, you know, is doing well for Cognizant and as per our plan. Obviously, the market dynamics of, you know, of when we acquired Belcan to what where we are right now have changed. But Belcan’s performance, you know, is as per our plan, and, integration also is on plan. Coming to the acquisition, I mean, we are constantly on lookout for the right opportunities.

And, our focus for capital deployment or m and a is, on three dimensions. One is either we get access to the newer market or underpenetrated market that we are in or would help us build the capability that is missing in Cognizant or would help us expand into new geographies that we are not present today. So if we are looking for assets that takes one of these or a combination of these, then we are on lookout for the right opportunities. And we will continue to look at either tuck in acquisitions or the acquisitions of size that satisfies this re criteria.

Brian Keene, Citi’s tech conference host, Citi: Okay. With that, Saree, we’re gonna keep it there. Thanks so much. Thanks

Sarea Ghumadi, Head of Americas, Cognizant: for being here. Thank you so much.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.