Cognizant Forms 25,000-Strong OpenAI Frontier Capability Group

Cognizant announced the formation of its OpenAI Frontier Capability Group on October 30, 2026, bringing together more than 25,000 professionals in a global delivery organization aligned to delivering OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT, for clients. The announcement, datelined Teaneck, New Jersey, said the group is designed to help enterprises apply OpenAI models to how they write software, serve customers and run day-to-day operations.

In the announcement, Cognizant said access to frontier models is no longer what holds many enterprises back; what they lack is skilled professionals who know how to build with those models inside the systems their businesses depend on. The company said it has been building that capability across its own workforce, where more than 21,000 associates have earned more than 40,000 OpenAI badges, each awarded for completion of learning tracks on OpenAI technologies. The new group adds an organization focused on building and supporting the operation of OpenAI-powered systems for clients.

The group’s work is expected to draw on Cognizant’s Frontier workforce model, through which the company is developing Frontier Certified Engineers and Frontier Business Operators credentialed directly by frontier-model companies. Cognizant introduced those roles in a June 1, 2026, announcement and said in a July 9, 2026, release that it would scale to 5,000 Frontier Certified Engineers and 10,000 Frontier Business Operators, according to the company’s investor-relations news archive.

Cognizant said it often tests new approaches in its own business before taking them to clients. Its sales and customer success teams already use a solution built on OpenAI models to find and pursue new opportunities, an internal deployment the company said allows the group’s client work to start from methods tested at scale inside a global enterprise.

“Over the last 50 years, every shift in enterprise technology has changed who builds the systems and how,” said Ravi Kumar S, chief executive of Cognizant. “With Codex and ChatGPT, OpenAI is changing both at once. We are committing more than 25,000 of our people to bring that change inside our clients’ businesses.”

OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Dali Rajic said in the announcement: “By bringing together more than 25,000 professionals in a dedicated OpenAI practice and putting our technology to work across its own operations, Cognizant is helping more enterprises turn AI into meaningful business impact.”

Initial Focus Areas

According to the announcement, the group will initially focus on three areas: AI-native software engineering with Codex, application modernization and agentic customer operations. Codex anchors the first area and is designed to support engineers as they write, test and ship new code.

In application modernization, the group will use Cognizant Application Modernizer, powered by OpenAI models, across the full lifecycle, from reverse engineering legacy mainframe code to generating cloud-native code, with engineers reviewing every consequential decision. Cognizant said that work is backed by its experience modernizing mainframe systems for more than 500 clients. In customer operations, the group will apply OpenAI models to sales, service and support, drawing on Cognizant’s experience using them in its own business.

The company said it is already delivering for clients. At a global biopharmaceutical company, Cognizant co-engineered an OpenAI-powered enterprise assistant that brings search, content creation, translation and approvals into one place; the assistant has handled more than 5 million conversations and cut content creation time by 60%, the company said.

Partnership History

Cognizant is one of a select group of Advanced partners in the OpenAI Partner Network. OpenAI’s partner page for Cognizant lists the company as an Advanced Partner serving clients globally across financial services, government and public sector, healthcare and life sciences, media and entertainment, and retail and consumer goods, with AWS, Daybreak and Oracle listed as program partners. The page also credits Cognizant with the Codex Industry Transformation Pioneer Award from OpenAI’s Partner Summit 2026.

The formation follows a series of OpenAI collaborations Cognizant announced earlier in 2026. On April 21, 2026, OpenAI named Cognizant among a select group of partners chosen to scale Codex across enterprise clients worldwide, and Cognizant said it was embedding Codex into engineering workflows across its Software Engineering Group with the goal of making it a standardized capability for how the company builds and delivers software. On July 2, 2026, the companies announced a frontier AI cyber defense collaboration spanning the path from vulnerability discovery to validated fixes. Cognizant’s OpenAI partnership page states that Cognizant is one of the few OpenAI partners with access to OpenAI cyber models for running end-to-end cyber resilience, and describes the company as both an Advanced Partner and a Select partner for scaling Codex.

Cognizant said its Codex hackathons in India and the Americas brought together more than 12,000 participants, with the flagship India hackathon on July 30, 2026, spanning 10,000 associates across the country.