Cognizant formed an OpenAI Frontier Capability Group of more than 25,000 staff

Cognizant announced on October 30 that it has formed an OpenAI Frontier Capability Group, a global delivery organization of more than 25,000 professionals who will deploy OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT, for clients. The Next Web notes it comes 11 days after Cognizant put 18,000 staff behind Google's Gemini.

Cognizant argues that many enterprises are held back by a shortage of people who can build with frontier models inside existing systems, not by access to the models. It says more than 21,000 of its associates have earned over 40,000 OpenAI badges for learning tracks. CEO Ravi Kumar S said, "We are committing more than 25,000 of our people to bring that change inside our clients' businesses."

The group starts with three areas: AI-native software engineering with Codex, application modernization, and agentic customer operations. For modernization it will use Cognizant Application Modernizer, powered by OpenAI models, from reverse engineering legacy mainframe code to generating cloud-native code, with engineers reviewing every consequential decision. Cognizant says it has modernized mainframe systems for more than 500 clients.

As an example, Cognizant says it co-engineered an OpenAI-powered assistant for a global biopharmaceutical company that has handled more than 5 million conversations and cut content creation time by 60 percent. These figures come from Cognizant's announcement as reported by Unite.AI. Cognizant is an Advanced partner in the OpenAI Partner Network, and OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer Dali Rajic praised the practice.

For developers, the story shows how coding agents are reaching large enterprises through services firms. If you work on legacy modernization or inside a big IT shop, expect more Codex-driven projects with human review built in. Cognizant is also not exclusive. It credentials engineers across GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex, according to the announcement.

What to watch is whether the group's client results beyond the one case study are published, and how Cognizant splits its people between OpenAI and Google work. The numbers here are company claims.

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