Cognizant’s chief strategy officer Malcolm Frank is convinced that machines won’t kill jobs and that one is not going to witness a war between machines and humans. Instead, they will work together, he said during a talk on ‘What to do when machines do everything!’ organised by The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Chennai in association with Nasscom in Chennai. The Hindu caught up with him for a quick 10-minute interaction after the session. Edited excerpts:
You spoke about how robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machines are changing the world. So, when it comes to acquisitions, especially in the digital space, do you keep these things in mind?
Our strategy around acquisitions, as you know, has been acquiring for capability and not for capacity and that’s going to continue. We are a huge organisation and we don’t have to acquire for capacity. In the digital world you are going to see us become more and more aggressive. So, we have been acquiring [a] number of firms around specific geographies. We had some design and strategy houses like Idea Couture (a privately held firm that offers a broad range of digital innovation, strategy, design and technology services) in Canada, Mirabeau BV in Netherlands. So, you are going to see us acquire firms like that and also [in] machine learning, AI organisations that are focussed on very specific vertical industry problems.
How easy or challenging is it for employees to adapt to the changes that are happening in the digital space? The employees in the mid level in specific, can they be trained?
Trainable, yes. [It is] the willingness that really varies. But it’s not necessarily a function of age. There are lot of things that go into that. Some times people appear as aged — but when somebody is comfortable with that technology they are emotionally invested they feel that they have mastered it and their reputation and self-esteem is tied up with that.
But I think anybody, particularly when they come into services business, you come in knowing that technologies continuously evolve and you have to continuously evolve with them. The big trigger quite often is when you see it through your customer’s eyes. Sometimes people can get into denial and think I won’t invest in those skill sets because I can just do this for the next five or ten years. But when you sit down with the client and the client tells you what you’re currently doing with those technologies was important to me ten years ago but now I view it as a commodity. That’s when we see people more motivated to make the shift. It’s easy to talk about change but change is hard, particularly when change is somebody else’s idea it’s doubly hard. One of things we have done at Cognizant Academy is we have got this institutional capability to help with this transition and scale.
Where does Cognizant stand when it comes to digital shift?
We re-organised the whole company 12-13 months ago all around digital. We quietly reorganised the whole firm because the client, when we make this transition, they have to change their operations, technology and we need to align with the needs of our clients.
Are you considering hiring non-graduates?
I believe deeply in the college experience. Certainly you learn very tangible skills. But those skills are going to evolve quickly. I believe in getting graduates. We are reasonably young firm. Are we going to separate headcount from revenue? I have been in this industry for three decades and everyone has been talking about it. We have started seeing automation in certain pockets of the business but you’re still going to see good head count growth. We will be a fairly strong hirer.
