Cognizant is turning everyday workplace chats into $200 million AI experiment

Cognizant, the IT service giant, has identified over $200 million worth of additional sales opportunities by leveraging AI tools to analyse employees’ day-to-day communications such as emails, meeting notes, chat conversations and other work-related exchanges. The company projects that the opportunity could grow to nearly $1 billion by the end of the year.

CEO Ravi Kumar at Cognizant’s AI Forum said, “At this point of time, we roughly have $200 million of pipeline generated incrementally through this extraordinary effort of doing a sprawl on the systems, emails, meetings, chats, everything else and generating it.”

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The company claimed that it built an AI system called “context engineering,” an AI-powered tool that understands the context behind interactions. It has the ability to pick clues from employees’ everyday interactions across different departments, such as sales teams talking to customers about their needs, delivery teams implementing projects, support teams resolving issues, and employees in other customer-facing roles.

These cues could include meeting notes, emails, chat discussions, customer feedback, support tickets, or observations. It collects this data and insights into potential sales opportunities that conventional sales methods might miss. With the system, Cognizant is going one step further by teaching AI systems to understand how the business works by combining institutional knowledge with operational context.

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On the other hand, Meta also planned a similar move that will track employees’ activities such as keystrokes, mouse movements, clicks, and screen content on work devices to train its AI agents. However, this raised concerns among employees over privacy. Many employees also protested against the move. Later, Meta’s Vice President of Superintelligence Labs, Stephane Kasriel, issued a memo highlighting changes to its internal tracking system. 

On the other hand, Cognizant is smartly using the technology to generate potential revenue streams. The company is also exploring ways to expand the use of its AI system in staffing decisions, such as matching employees to projects based on past work contributions.