PR Newswire
Cognizant expands its commitment to America’s workforce by hiring U.S. college graduates, scaling new AI-era job categories, leading a national worker-transition coalition and doubling a global AI skilling commitment to two million people
TEANECK, N.J., Sept. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH), a leading AI Builder and technology services provider, today detailed how it is building and preparing the American workforce for the AI era. 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, and Cognizant is committed to helping American workers capture that opportunity first. Cognizant plans to hire 1,500 U.S. college graduates and scale a new Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator workforce to 15,000 people, backed by annual direct hiring from universities. The company’s position is that AI should expand opportunity for American workers, not shrink it.
That commitment extends beyond Cognizant’s own hiring. The company has also joined RAISE US, a new bipartisan national coalition, with Ravi Kumar S serving on its Advisory Board, and signed the White House’s Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education. Furthering that commitment, Cognizant’s global Synapse skilling initiative has already surpassed its original goal of training one million people a full year ahead of schedule, prompting Cognizant to double its ambition to two million by 2030.
“We are hiring American graduates, standing up new American job categories for the AI era, and putting Cognizant’s capital and leadership behind a national coalition built to make sure this transition works for workers,” said Ravi Kumar S, Chief Executive Officer of Cognizant. “We believe AI will create significantly more jobs than it displaces and shift greater value, wages and accountability to the frontlines of America’s workforce. The opportunity now is to build those pathways quickly, so American workers and enterprises capture that value first.”
Building the American AI-Era Workforce
As Cognizant continues to invest in homegrown talent, the company aims to hire graduates from across the country and draw on its university 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, to hire its 2026 graduate roles.
The company is also scaling Frontier Certified Engineers and Frontier Business Operators, a new AI-era professional job family, to a combined 15,000 people, with university hiring built into the model. The approach is already delivering results: a Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator pod recently reimagined a large food-service company’s account-management workflow into seventeen production AI agents, reclaiming roughly eleven hours per account manager each week. That workforce is being built on the leading frontier AI platforms: 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. 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.
“AI is fundamentally reshaping job roles across sectors, and the workforce should be helping drive that change instead of scrambling to keep up with it,” said Surya Gummadi, President, Americas, Cognizant. “That’s why we’re hiring U.S. graduates directly into the roles this shift is creating. Frontier Certified Engineers and Frontier Business Operators are real, funded positions at Cognizant today, and they are proof that this transition creates opportunity for American workers, not just disruption.”
Leading a National Coalition for Worker Transition
RAISE US was launched by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb to help American workers transition into the AI economy. Ravi Kumar S sits on its Advisory Board alongside leaders from Amazon, Anthropic, Bank of America, IBM, Microsoft and the OpenAI Foundation. The coalition launched with state partnerships in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah and aims to mobilize $1 billion to fund worker retraining, redeployment incentives and new earn-and-learn training pathways.
“America has a technology strategy for leading the global AI competition. It does not yet have a people strategy — and we cannot lead without one,” said Gina Raimondo, CEO of RAISE US, at the coalition’s launch. Kumar added: “RAISE US gives us a platform to advance the work we’ve already started at Cognizant, and to co-design and scale these models with industry and state partners to strengthen workforce transitions across the U.S.”
Expanding Skilling, Education and Philanthropic Commitments
Beyond Synapse, Cognizant has awarded $70 million in philanthropic grants since 2018 to expand access to STEM education and technology careers and has built a global strategic partnership with Pearson and a workforce-development collaboration with the Association of Community College Trustees. Research from Cognizant and Oxford Economics underpinning these commitments estimates that AI is already capable of performing $4.5 trillion worth of U.S. work tasks today, with generative AI poised to inject $1 trillion into the U.S. economy over the next decade. Cognizant frames the gap between that potential and what enterprises are realizing today as a workforce problem the company intends to help solve through direct investment in American training infrastructure.
“Every one of these efforts points to the same conclusion,” said Kumar. “The AI economy will be built by people who know how to work with AI, not by AI alone. Cognizant is proving that at scale, in American classrooms, on American campuses and inside American statehouses, and we intend to keep leading.”
About Cognizant
Cognizant is an AI Builder and technology services provider, bridging the gap between AI investment and enterprise value by building full-stack AI solutions for our clients. Our deep industry, process and engineering expertise enables us to build an organization’s unique context into technology systems that amplify human potential, drive tangible outcomes and keep global enterprises ahead in a fast-changing world. See how at cognizant.ai or @cognizant.
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