For months, the loudest voices in artificial intelligence—including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei—warned that entry-level white-collar jobs were headed for extinction. In recent weeks, both have walked back those statements.
And according to Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S., who oversees a workforce of more than 350,000 employees, the outcry wasn’t just a prediction gone wrong—it was fearmongering.
“There was a little bit of fearmongering from reading about the fact that there’s going to be a collapse of jobs,” Kumar said at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona on Monday. “I think there will be more jobs.”
Cognizant hasn’t been immune to restructuring and layoffs as it works to transform for the AI era. But Kumar told Fortune’s executive editorial director Diane Brady that the company hired 20,000 entry-level college graduates last year alone—and expects that number to grow in 2026.
Some of those roles will likely fall under Cognizant’s new AI Builder strategy, which introduces two new positions: Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator. And even though his company is focused in the tech world, candidates don’t need a technical background to qualify.“It could be a history major with skills to identify and use agentic work. It could be a biology major known as life sciences. It could be an HR accountant who can use agentic Claude terminals around them,” he said.
