14 | FORBES ASIA OCTOBER 2017
our own IP that is starting to contribute
to overall revenue. If, broadly, digital is
seen as [new] software plus services, over
25 % of Cognizant’s revenues come from
it as of the quarter ended June 3 0, 2 017.
Apart from that, we have platforms from
TriZetto and others.
How are the new services different
in terms of traditional billing for
employees assigned to a project?
In the platform work, we are focusing a
FORBES ASIA
COGNIZANT
lot on what we call Business Process as a
Service (BPaaS). It combines cloud-based
infrastructure, software and people as a
stack on a per-transaction billing. For in-
stance, a health insurer who signs up with
us for the BPaaS model will pay us on a
per-member-per-month basis. And there
is a menu of services. Take claims pro-
cessing, for instance. They get the soft-
ware, the underlying cloud infrastructure
and the people who will actually do the
claims processing—a kind of IT-in-a-box.It gives clients flexibility, and for us the
pricing is not based on people but based
on some output or delivery. Much of our
new kinds of work is on some kind of
BPaaS model.As you evolve, what concerns you?
In the past, there were periods of rapid
advances followed by longer stretch-
es during which new technologies were
widely deployed. With digital, technolo-
gy is evolving on multiple fronts and at
a much faster pace. The ability of a com-
pany to sense and respond quickly at
this pace is new. It’s particularly impor-
tant now, and one that we can’t miss. Part
of the challenge right now is that just as
there are technologies that we can see
today that are clearly important, there
are emerging technologies on the hori-
zon that may or may not become impor-
tant. That sense-and-respond mechanism
is critical at this point in time. I spend a
lot of time making sure that we keep one
foot in the present and one foot in the fu-
ture, ensuring that we don’t miss an im-
portant trend.Three to five years from now, what kind
of a Cognizant will we see?
As the world becomes more tech-inten-
sive, as tech becomes more complex and
the ecosystem and range of available tech
broadens, the need for companies like ours
in advising our clients on the right tech-
nology will only become more critical. Our
businesses will evolve—they will continue
to be large services businesses, but with
strong tech and IP underpinnings.
On AI [artificial intelligence], we are
still in the very early stages from a large-
scale-deployment perspective. We think
about AI for our clients. We are already
seeing that much of the work that we do
will have some AI components—it will
give us the opportunity to automate the
work done today manually by humans. It
will serve to amplify, make people more
productive and more efficient. I’ve heard
of predictions and fears that AI will sub-
stantially reduce employment in the ser-
vices industry. I don’t think that will be
the case.
Adapted from Forbes India, a licensee
of Forbes Media.F“Cognizant, and the
tech industry in general,
is in the early innings” :
CEO Francisco D’SouzaMADHU KAPPARATH FOR FORBES INDIA