From projects to platforms: How Cognizant is rewiring delivery for the AI era

There’s a quiet but decisive shift underway in the IT services industry. For years, platforms have been positioned as accelerators—useful, often powerful, but largely sitting alongside traditional project delivery. That model is starting to break down.

The trigger is familiar. AI.

As enterprises push beyond pilots into scaled adoption, the limits of project-centric execution are becoming harder to ignore. AI doesn’t behave well in fragmented environments. It demands consistency, governance, repeatability—and above all, a foundation that can support continuous change rather than one-time delivery.

That’s the backdrop against which Cognizant is rethinking how engineering work gets done.

In this conversation, Pramod Bijani, Senior Vice President – Platform Group (Engineering), Cognizant lays out why the company has moved towards a platform-first operating model. Pramod believes that platforms are no longer just about speed or efficiency. They are becoming the control layer for AI at scale—standardizing execution ...