Cognizant forms Claude managed-services group with 25,000 professionals

Cognizant says its model has the company operate Claude-powered systems in production on clients’ behalf.[1] The offering combines dedicated talent, licensed Claude access and Cognizant’s own intellectual property.[1] Cognizant says it intends the model to make AI spending more predictable and provide enterprise-grade security and governance controls tailored to each client’s requirements.[1] For buyers, the distinction to assess is that the offer covers ongoing operation as well as access to Claude.[1]

Cognizant says the group will initially focus on AI-led business redesign, system modernization, secure agent operations at scale and AI-native software engineering.[1] One stated application is using purpose-built Claude agents to analyze and refactor legacy and mainframe code.[1] The announcement therefore points to work spanning business processes, existing systems and software development, rather than a single use case. Cognizant says it intends to tailor security and governance controls to client requirements.[1]

Cognizant says more than 25,000 professionals are in the dedicated global Claude delivery organization.[1] It also says more than 44,000 associates across business units and corporate functions have been trained or certified on Claude, and that it holds more than 26,000 Claude certifications.[1] These figures describe different measures: the delivery group, people trained or certified, and certifications held. Cognizant says the Claude organization is separate from its OpenAI Frontier Capability Group, which also has more than 25,000 professionals and covers products including Codex and ChatGPT.[3][4]

Cognizant reports that Claude-powered shop-floor agents built for a global pharmaceutical manufacturer cut downtime by 35%; troubleshooting time fell from 90–120 minutes to 10–15 minutes.[1] For a media and entertainment company, Cognizant says Claude automated requirement data sheet creation, reducing time to market from three to four weeks to about 15 minutes.[1] It also reports that Claude-powered automation sped up campaign-brief generation and retirement-plan support by 40%–60% at a North American insurer.[1] These are company-reported examples; the evidence does not establish that other clients will achieve the same results.