Cognizant and Google Cloud expand alliance

Cognizant and Google Cloud have formed an expanded partnership to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by businesses around the world. This effort will help clients create, migrate, and modernise their AI journeys, meeting them where they are.

“I’m extremely excited by the recent breakthroughs in generative AI that can help us move toward transforming our clients’ businesses while accelerating their productivity and thereby driving significant impact,” said Ravi Kumar, CEO of Cognizant. “By expanding our long-standing alliance with Google Cloud to leverage our existing technology capabilities, upskill our talent, and deliver advanced technologies to our clients, Cognizant will play a critical role in supporting the global shift to responsible AI use.”

“Generative AI has the potential to create significant business value by streamlining how we work, creating new consumer experiences, helping people better utilise data, and much more,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud. “Our partnership with Cognizant will accelerate enterprises’ application of generative AI with more highly skilled AI experts, new solutions focused on creating business value, and deep experience applying Google Cloud technologies to industries like financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and retail.”

In deepening the alliance, Cognizant will invest in expanding its product offerings, providing robust training resources for tech talent development on Google Cloud, and launching innovation hubs in key technology centres worldwide to prompt collaboration and innovation around the responsible use of AI.

Building further on Cognizant’s existing Data Modernisation and Data Analytics specialisations on Google Cloud, Cognizant will build a suite of transformative solutions for all industries, leveraging Google Cloud’s      generative AI, predictive AI, and analytics capabilities. The first solution suites to be offered will be for the banking, insurance, life sciences, and retail industries.   

Cognizant’s solution suites will utilise Google Cloud's new suite of generative AI products, including large language models (LLMs) and Gen App Builder. Gen App Builder exploits the full power of Google Cloud      generative AI to significantly lower rollout barriers (lead times, skill required, and effort) for high-value enterprise use cases such as Conversational AI and Enterprise Search. Google Cloud also offers direct Application Programming Interface (API) access to the underlying LLMs via generative AI support in Vertex AI. Additional foundation model choices are available in the Vertex AI Model Garden, which offers a variety of first-party, third-party and open-source models, each optimised for a different task and/or domain, providing a broad range of choices tailored for client needs.

“Organisations must navigate a wide spectrum of challenges throughout their AI adoption journeys, and with the advent of generative AI, the journey has gotten even more complex,” said Jennifer Hamel, research director, Analytics and Intelligent Automation Services, at IDC. “Partnering with trusted providers of professional services and technology solutions will be critical to address these challenges while accelerating AI innovation and deployment at scale.”

Cognizant’s investments in developing generative AI capabilities include launching the Cognizant Google Cloud AI University, a new program that will train 25,000 Cognizant professionals on Google Cloud AI technologies, which will also be offered to Cognizant clients. The university will offer a variety of courses, including introductory courses on AI fundamentals, advanced courses on Google Cloud’s solutions, and specific AI use cases.

Cognizant will also open a series of Google Cloud AI Innovation hubs in Bangalore, London, and San Francisco. These hubs will bring together Cognizant experts, Google Cloud experts, customers, and university students to collaborate on responsible AI projects and solutions.

Cognizant is a premier Global Systems Integrator partner for Google Cloud and a Luminary Sponsor for the 2023 Google Cloud Next conference. In 2021, Cognizant expanded its relationship with Google Cloud by creating a dedicated Google Cloud Business Group (GBG) to help accelerate shared clients' cloud modernisation journeys across key vertical markets. Cognizant currently holds several partner specialisations and expertise credentials on Google Cloud and has one of the largest global resource pools of Google-certified architects and engineers.