Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar runs an IT services company of 350,000 people. It’s also not sold under the theory of humanity’s CEO Dario Amodei, which says that AI will cut entry-level white-collar jobs in half.
Kumar, a former nuclear scientist, told Business Insider he has a “whole paper” to which he bets on the opposite outcome.
“My point is that you probably have more fresh people, which means the level of expertise required will be lower.
As CEO of a company that employs hundreds of thousands of workers who write code, Kumar sits at the forefront of organizations that can be heavily affected by automation tools like Codex.
The CEO said he wasn’t sure his theory would be developed, but these are the reasons he is advocating in favor of it.
AI lowers entry barriers
Kumar said AI levelles productivity across roles. People at the bottom of the chain are seeing big profits, while people at the top are seeing smaller improvements, he said. At Cognizant, Kumar said the bottom 50% of developers are increasing productivity by 37% compared to the top half of 17%.
Kumar said the “big shift” that separates AI from other technological revolutions is that machines can provide expertise. He said deep expertise is less important with the advent of AI tools, but that interdisciplinary skills are becoming more valuable.
“To date, the tech confusion has put information at your fingertips,” Kumar said. “This is a technique that puts expertise at your fingertips.”
More human labor is required overall
Kumar said as the workforce changes and businesses deploy AI agents at scale, engineers will move from writing code to managing code that manages humans and developing software that manages agents.
“So this whole paradigm opens up more software embraces because you do less, so when you do less, software adoption will rise,” Kumar said.
Kumar said that as AI cuts the costs of work, companies have the ability to absorb that productivity and achieve more. The industry’s demand may change, but that doesn’t mean that companies need fewer people, Kumar said.
“More things will be rethinked and more human labor will be required to supplement AI digital labor,” Kumar said.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon similarly told BI in an interview that demand for new products outweighed the increased efficiency. As a result, he hopes that companies will hire more software engineers in the coming years.
It’s too early to know the real impact on your work
Kumar is not entirely convinced of the objections to human CEOs.
“I don’t know the correct answer, but at least I know that the model will change,” Kumar said.
Kumar reflects a broader sense of uncertainty in the tech industry, with corporate executives preaching the possibility of both outcomes.
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently reflected Amodei’s warning, saying that AI could cause a recession, and predicted the replacement of several white-collar jobs. Payment companies have cut their labor force from around 5,500 to 3,000 over the past two years as a result of increased AI productivity, but have again dialed human employment after a job freeze. Other companies like Salesforce have suspended hiring engineers for the year after improved efficiency.
Other high-tech executives, like Google Cloud CTO Will Grannis, recently told BI that AI tools can help provide “superpowers” to entry-level workers. The Amazon AI leader similarly said junior developers are getting the most out of AI tools.
Kumar remains primarily optimistic about the AI revolution, but he said we should all be paranoid. In most periods of disruptive technology, there was one outcome that was most likely, but in the age of AI, multiple outcomes are plausible.
“There is no guarantee for one more,” Kumar said. “Therefore you should have a delusion about what will happen to us and the world around us.”
