Cognizant to Deploy 1,000 Context Engineers to Industrialize Agentic AI

Cognizant has announced a strategic initiative to industrialize agentic AI across enterprises by deploying 1,000 context engineers over the next year. This move marks a pivotal investment in the emerging discipline of context engineering, which is essential to enabling AI agents to reason, act, and adapt in alignment with enterprise goals.

As part of this initiative, Cognizant is partnering with Workfabric AI, the company building the context engine for enterprise AI. Cognizant’s 1,000 context engineers will be powered by Workfabric AI’s ContextFabric™ platform, which transforms the organizational DNA of enterprises — including their workflows, data, rules, and processes — into actionable context for AI agents. By serving as a continuous runtime grounding layer, ContextFabric industrializes context engineering at scale.

What is Context Engineering?

Cognizant defines context as a company’s pool of knowledge, including its operating model, roles, goals, metrics, processes, policies and governance systems. This collection of intelligence, which manifests itself in content, data, applications, and workflows, is the fuel for AI Agents to be precise and effective. The science and art of bringing the right context, at the right time to agentic systems is the emerging discipline of context engineering.

Context engineering is designed to help AI systems represent enterprise knowledge, align with human intent and reflect company work-culture. With context engineering, agents can be built to deliver outcomes that foster trust, uphold enterprise standards, and support strategic business goals.

Leadership Perspectives

"Every technology shift creates a services shift," said Ravi Kumar S, CEO, Cognizant. "In the microprocessor era, the lever was code. In the cloud era, it was workload migration. In the LLM era, the lever is context. Cognizant’s deep expertise in engineering, operations, and industry domains positions us to create unique value. By training 1,000 context engineers and equipping them with Workfabric AI’s ContextFabric platform, we are helping our clients move beyond experimentation toward scalable AI adoption."

"Cognizant’s commitment to this discipline, starting with 1,000 context engineers, is a bold signal of where the services industry is headed," said Rohan N. Murty, CEO of Workfabric AI. "ContextFabric will be the force multiplier that turns this vision into reality, enabling engineers to deliver trusted, enterprise-grade outcomes. In enterprise deployments, the platform has demonstrated improvements such as up to 3X higher accuracy, 70% fewer hallucinations, faster deployment cycles, and higher ROI, depending on use case and implementation. Together, we are building the foundation for the era of contextual computing."

New Value for Clients

As Cognizant’s context engineers engage with clients through the Agentic Development Lifecycle (ADLC) phases, supported by ContextFabric, they will:

• Capture enterprise knowledge, including processes, rules, and execution patterns.

• Manage the full context lifecycle, ensuring governance, privacy, and security.

• Build integration pipelines for retrieval, synthesis, storage & distribution of context.

• Package reusable context assets (“context packs”) for scalable deployment.

Additionally, Cognizant’s context engineers can deliver new value for clients by embedding organizational knowledge and governance into AI systems. The impact of this work can bring the following benefits:

• Risk Reduction: Agents operate in alignment with client-defined standards and applicable regulations.

• Higher ROI: Trusted, accurate agents increase adoption.

• Efficiency Gains: Fewer errors and rework.

• Accelerated Time-to-Value: Reusable assets and libraries.

Outlook

Cognizant’s strategic initiative marks a significant step toward the industrialization of agentic AI. By committing to the new discipline of context engineering and partnering with Workfabric AI, Cognizant is addressing a critical challenge that has held back enterprise AI adoption: the need for AI systems to operate with accuracy and align with human goals. This investment positions Cognizant to lead clients beyond AI pilots to large-scale, trusted, and impactful enterprise solutions, setting a new standard for AI services in the industry.

Explainers

• Agentic AI: A type of artificial intelligence that can autonomously reason, plan, and act to achieve a specific goal, often by interacting with its environment and other systems.

• Context Engineering: The emerging discipline of providing AI agents with the necessary real-world knowledge (context) about an organization’s workflows, data, and processes to enable them to perform tasks effectively and safely.

• Hallucinations: In the context of AI, a hallucination is a confidently delivered response from an AI model that is factually incorrect, nonsensical, or unfaithful to the source material.