But I want to focus on some insights from Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. I spoke with him on stage yesterday about why he’s hiring more entry-level graduates and the perils of tokenmaxxing. We’ve talked in the past about the Hollywood studio model as a better way to organize work. He thinks deeply about the broad impact of AI and how it will change not just his company but business and society. So I grabbed time with him after our fireside to drill down on some topics. Among them:
Macro delegate and micro steer: “This is a tectonic shift where the technology is in the hands of the users. You decide the things you do yourself and the things you outsource to an AI agent, who will be yours. It will be a process where you constantly macro delegate and micro steer. Most people are not used to working directly with technology because somebody else created it for them. Now, you don’t need to code. You just need to express the things you want to do and integrate that into your workflow. That changes what skills matter. It’s why we created these new positions.”
Workers in the middle: “Historically, we created these middle layers because they had the expertise, the tribal knowledge, the heritage of the company. They were able to bridge the asymmetry of information going up and down the pyramid. Now technology bridges that, which means we need a player-coach who isn’t competing with the technology but has the experience to verify, validate … people who can both execute and develop others.”
