Dive Brief:
- Cognizant plans to expand its U.S. workforce and prioritize AI upskilling, company executives said during the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call on Wednesday. The IT consulting and services firm grew revenues nearly 5% year over year to $5.7 billion in the three-month period ended Sept. 30.
- “Today, we have approximately 32,000 employees in the U.S. and we have invested significantly to scale our local talent base over the last several years,” CFO Jatin Dulal said, referencing the U.S. Department of Labor’s recent decision to suspend Cognizant’s access to the Permanent Labor Certification Program, also known as PERM. “We do not expect the PERM suspension to have a material impact on our talent strategy or operations,” he added.
- Cognizant was one of a handful of large channel firms the DOL and Vice President JD Vance sanctioned for outsourcing IT labor earlier this month. In September, prior to the Trump administration’s actions, the New Jersey-based firm pledged to hire 1,500 U.S. college graduates and grow its bench of certified AI engineers and operations specialists to 15,000.
Dive Insight:
The Labor Department’s outsourcing sanctions put a spotlight on the tech industry’s talent challenges in the race to drive AI adoption. Despite recent efforts by Microsoft to trim its workforce and a minor dip in tech hiring, IT job postings reached a three-year high last month, according to CompTIA’s analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
IT services firms are competing for a limited pool of available engineers with the skills to help enterprises deploy, support and govern AI capabilities, Gartner Senior Director Analyst Mukul Saha told Channel Dive last month.
Cognizant is on the hunt for AI talent.
“We are evolving our workforce, building frontier roles around the capabilities needed to design, deploy and operate AI-native solutions,” Cognizant CEO and Director Ravi Kumar S said during the earnings call. “These roles combine engineering, AI fluency and business expertise with greater accountability for client outcomes.”
The company partnered with Google Cloud to launch the Gemini Frontier Capability Group in October. The AI-focused business unit will be staffed with more than 18,000 Frontier Certified Engineers, a designation created by Cognizant earlier this year for AI-enablement technicians.
Cognizant executives touted the success of the certification program Wednesday.
“Historically, major technology transitions required capacity to deploy new technology at scale,” Kumar said. “We are building that capacity across our talent, engineering platforms and partner ecosystem with leading frontier AI companies, hyperscalers and enterprise technology providers.”
The company boasts more than 45,000 associates who have earned nearly 100,000 AI platform certifications, with another 65,000-plus in progress, Kumar added.
Cognizant grew its Microsoft practice through the acquisition of Azure services provider 3Cloud last year. The purchase brought 1,000-plus Azure engineers and more than 1,500 Microsoft certifications into the Cognizant fold.
In April, the company acquired managed service provider Astreya, a move Kumar said bolsters Cognizant’s workspace and data center service capabilities.
“The trillions of dollars being spent on AI infrastructure build-out creates opportunities across data center operations, networks, AI environments and digital workplace services,” Kumar said. “Our Astreya acquisition strengthens our ability to serve this market.”
