Cognizant and Google Cloud Expand Agentic AI Partnership
Cognizant announced a new phase in its strategic partnership with Google Cloud. The collaboration aims to help large enterprises move beyond AI strategy to deploy and govern agentic AI systems at scale.
- The partnership centers on deploying Google's Gemini Enterprise and Google Workspace to clients, with Cognizant also adopting the technology internally to boost its own productivity and service speed. - To scale delivery, Cognizant is establishing a dedicated Gemini Enterprise Center of Excellence and will use its proprietary no-code tool, Cognizant Agent Foundry, for rapid development of AI agents for use cases like intelligent order management. - This collaboration builds on a multi-year relationship; in 2021, Cognizant created a dedicated Google Cloud Business Group, and in May 2023, it launched the Cognizant Google Cloud AI University to train 25,000 professionals. - Agentic AI, which allows systems to autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks, is a rapidly growing market projected to increase from $8.5 billion in 2026 to $45 billion by 2030. - Enterprise adoption is accelerating, with one survey finding 100% of enterprises plan to expand their use of agentic AI in 2026, and 74% viewing it as a strategic or critical priority. - Prior to this expansion, the two companies launched an AI-powered contact center solution, "Autonomous Customer Engagement," using Google Cloud's voice and natural language processing capabilities. - The collaboration positions Cognizant as an "AI builder," moving beyond consulting to implementing governed, enterprise-grade AI systems with a defined "Agent Development Lifecycle" from design to production. - This is part of a broader $1 billion investment in generative AI by Cognizant, which also includes a partnership with Google competitor Anthropic to use its Claude large language model for building an "agentified enterprise".
