Cognizant to hire up to 25,000 freshers in 2026 as AI drives ‘broader pyramid’ workforce strategy

IT service giant Cognizant on Wednesday said it is planning to hire about 24,000 to 25,000 freshers in 2026, a 20% increase comparing it 2025 intake, as part of its strategy to expand its workforce at the bottom level.

During the Q4 2025 earnings call, Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. said the company is pursuing a “broader pyramid” strategy, using AI to move high-value technical work to entry-level roles. It simply means that AI will be used to push expertise downward in the organization and widen the base of junior talent.

Of the 20,000 employees hired last year, about 16,000 have already been placed on client projects, while around 4,000 are still undergoing training, highlighting the company’s growing reliance on campus hiring to build its workforce.

This comes at a time when companies are laying off workers and there are debates on AI disrupting jobs. Cognizant said it looks for learnability over just experience while hiring graduates and those who can work with AI tools. 

The company said its partnerships with AI platforms, like Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI, are helping push expertise to junior employees, improving productivity at the base of the workforce. As a result, instead of cutting jobs, the company is hiring more freshers, with AI, automation, and agentic tools supporting this shift, it said.

In 2025, Cognizant added approximately 14,800 employees, growing its workforce by 4 per cent, while revenue rose faster at 6.4 per cent. In the December quarter alone, the company added about 1,800 employees.As of December 31, 2025, Cognizant’s total headcount was 351,600 as per its Q4 2025.

Before this, in Q3 2025, the company had about 349,800 employees globally, according to its investor data. Mid-year figures from June 2025 showed around 3,43,800 employees, indicating steady growth through 2025. Looking back at earlier annual figures, Cognizant’s workforce has fluctuated, for example, it had about 336,800 employees in 2024, 347,700 in 2023, and 355,300 in 2022, reflecting changes in hiring and restructuring over time.