Bucking The Trend: Why This CEO Is Hiring 20,000 Graduates And Thinks Tokenmaxxing Is Vanity

Bucking the trend: Why this CEO is hiring 20,000 graduates and thinks tokenmaxxing is vanity

Last updated: 2026/06/02 at 6:51 AM

News Room Published 2 June 2026

Despite the AI focus, the Cognizant CEO is welcoming more and more employees. (Image: Shutterstock/AlyshaYogi)

Ravi Kumar S has been CEO of Cognizant since 2023. The IT service provider from the USA now has more than 350,000 employees worldwide. This is despite the fact that Kumar invested more than a billion US dollars in a new AI infrastructure for the company shortly after taking office. Other CEOs who have integrated AI into their companies are more likely to cut jobs in such a situation, according to a survey. But Kumar is hiring more employees.

More employees despite an AI focus

The CEO revealed how this fits together at Fortune’s COO Summit. Kumar points out that many AI companies have played on employee fears: “There has been a lot of fearmongering by reading statements that there will be a job collapse. I think there will be more jobs.” Last year, Kumar and Cognizant hired 20,000 graduates straight out of college. This year the number is expected to increase.

According to Kumar, this is possible because new employees don’t necessarily need a technical background or knowledge of AI: “It could be someone with a history degree and skills to identify and use agentic work. (…) It could be an HR accountant who uses agentic Claude terminals around them.”

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According to Kumar, AI should form the middle of the workflow. Humans will always work before and after AI, according to the Cognizant CEO: “There will be validation and verification jobs and there will be a lot of authentication jobs.” The company has already created new professions for such tasks: Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator.

Kumar has no understanding of metrics like tokenmaxxing, which other companies use to show their AI performance: “For the past two years, the way and how many tokens are consumed has been a vanity metric. I don’t think you should equate that number with the number of paid working hours. I don’t think it should equate with productivity.” Instead, Kumar says companies should focus on using AI in the right places and at the right times, rather than using it everywhere: “It has to be grounded in the day-to-day operations of the company.”