Cognizant Puts More Than 25,000 Staff Into a New OpenAI Delivery Group
The OpenAI Frontier Capability Group will start with Codex software engineering, mainframe modernization and agentic customer operations.
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Cognizant said on October 30 that it has formed an OpenAI Frontier Capability Group of more than 25,000 professionals to deliver OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT, to enterprise clients. The group will start with three areas: AI-native software engineering with Codex, application modernization, and agentic customer operations.
Image: Illustrative photo of a developer coding on an iMac. Lee Campbell / Unsplash via Wikimedia Commons — CC0
What Cognizant announced
According to the company's release, the group is meant to help enterprises apply OpenAI models to how they write software, serve customers and run daily operations.
Cognizant's argument is that model access is no longer the main bottleneck. "Access to frontier models is no longer what holds many enterprises back," the release says. What clients lack, it argues, are people who can build with those models inside the systems their businesses depend on.
The company says more than 21,000 associates have earned more than 40,000 OpenAI badges, each for completing a learning track on OpenAI technologies. The new group adds an organization dedicated to building and supporting OpenAI-powered systems for clients.
That work is expected to draw on Cognizant's Frontier workforce model. Through it, the company says it is developing "Frontier Certified Engineers" and "Frontier Business Operators" credentialed directly by frontier-model companies.
The three focus areas
| Area | Main tool | What Cognizant says it covers |
|---|---|---|
| AI-native software engineering | Codex | Helping engineers write, test and ship code |
| Application modernization | Cognizant Application Modernizer, powered by OpenAI models | Reverse engineering legacy mainframe code through to cloud-native code |
| Agentic customer operations | OpenAI models | Sales, service and support |
For modernization, Cognizant says engineers review every consequential decision. It points to experience modernizing mainframe systems for more than 500 clients.
For customer operations, it says the group will draw on its own internal use. Cognizant's sales and customer success teams already use a solution built on OpenAI models to find and pursue new opportunities, according to the release.
What the executives said
"Over the last 50 years, every shift in enterprise technology has changed who builds the systems and how," said Ravi Kumar S, Cognizant's CEO. "With Codex and ChatGPT, OpenAI is changing both at once. We are committing more than 25,000 of our people to bring that change inside our clients' businesses. We started with our own, and OpenAI is beginning to reshape how we sell."
Dali Rajic, OpenAI's chief revenue officer, said that by building a dedicated practice and using the technology in its own operations, "Cognizant is helping more enterprises turn AI into meaningful business impact."
Early client work and partner status
Cognizant cites one client example. At a global biopharmaceutical company, it co-engineered an OpenAI-powered enterprise assistant that combines search, content creation, translation and approvals. The company says the assistant has handled more than 5 million conversations and cut content creation time by 60%. The client is not named.
Cognizant says it is one of a select group of Advanced partners in the OpenAI Partner Network. It adds that its Codex hackathons in India and the Americas drew more than 12,000 participants.
Why it matters
The announcement is a bet that the scarce resource in enterprise AI is delivery talent, not models. For large companies with legacy systems, the hard part is wiring frontier models into mainframes, customer-service stacks and existing code without breaking them.
Several details are worth noting. The 25,000 figure describes people "aligned to" OpenAI delivery, per the release, not new hires. The badge counts measure completed training, not production deployments. And the biopharma results come from Cognizant itself, without a named client or independent audit.
What enterprise buyers can ask:
- How many of the 25,000 will work on a given account, and with what credentials?
- Who reviews AI-generated code and modernization decisions, and how is that logged?
- Can the 60% content-time reduction be backed by a reference client?
- How does pricing compare with building an internal Codex or ChatGPT practice?
More coverage is on our Artificial Intelligence hub.
How we reported this
We checked every figure and quote against Cognizant's October 30 press release, the primary source for this story. The client results are Cognizant's own claims; we found no independent verification and have labeled them that way. The focus-area table and buyer questions are our own analysis.
Published and fact-checked October 30, 2026.
Sources
- Cognizant, "Cognizant commits more than 25,000 professionals to OpenAI delivery as enterprises move frontier AI into production," Oct. 30, 2026: https://news.cognizant.com/2026-10-30-Cognizant-commits-more-than-25,000-professionals-to-OpenAI-delivery-as-enterprises-move-frontier-AI-into-production
DailyMech used AI tools to help research and draft this article; it was fact-checked by our editors.