Stay Cognizant

Nearly every HR leader expects entry-level jobs to become AI supervision roles within five years. Most also admit their learning programs can't keep up, which means companies are hiring for jobs nobody has been trained to do.In this episode, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Ginny Ziegler, CMO of Pearson, and Thea Hayden, CMO of Cognizant, to go through findings from their joint AI Workforce Pulse report. Both are leading AI-first overhauls of their own marketing teams. They argue that the skills once filed under "nice to have" are now the entire job, and that in an AI economy, the ability to learn is the skill that lasts.

We also cover:

• Why AI output should be treated as a provocation, not a blueprint, and how to find where it falls short
• How Cognizant marketers built more than 300 working agents and prototypes in one hackathon
• Why careers now look more like a jungle gym than a ladder, and how to help people see their own progress

Two-thirds of senior executives can't point to a single measurable productivity gain from their AI investment. A quarter have already paused or abandoned a deployment outright. According to Ollie O'Donoghue, the reason isn't the technology but the road underneath it.

In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Ollie O'Donoghue, Head of Research at Cognizant, who leads the team behind Closing the Gap, a study of more than 1,100 senior leaders at G2000 companies across ten industries. Ollie spent years as a cloud analyst before taking over research, watching infrastructure go from a strategic conversation to an assumed commodity, and he makes the case that the assumption is now costing the G2000 roughly $2.4 trillion in revenue and cost savings it will never see. If you want a grounded read on why your pilots stalled and what the organizations ahead of you did differently, this episode gives you the data behind it.

Together, Pamela and Ollie dig into what actually determines whether AI investment converts: the ten dimensions of technical infrastructure and the two that carry the most weight; why a single dimension slipping from good to adequate costs you 1 to 1.5% of your productivity outcome; and the four-quadrant view of where your organization really sits, including the finding that surprised the research team most, that focused investment outperforms broad investment even when your foundations are weak. Ollie also explains why compute is simultaneously the biggest inhibitor leaders name and the first line item they cut, what external partners bring that can't be built in-house, and what the organizations at the top are doing with the $1 to $2 billion the rest of the market is leaving on the table.

Adequate used to be a passing grade. It isn't anymore and the enterprises seeing real returns are the ones that did the boring work first.

🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

Timestamps:

• 0:00 Intro – Welcome to Stay Cognizant
• 2:00 $4.5 Trillion of Capability, Nothing to Show for It
• 5:00 Why AI Programs Start, Stall, and Get Scrapped
• 8:00 The Quadrant: Focused vs Broad Investment
• 11:00 A Formula 1 Car on a Dirt Road
• 12:00 Ten Infrastructure Dimensions and the End of Adequate
• 15:00 Compute Is the Weakest Link and the Hardest Business Case
• 19:00 Who's Ahead by Industry and Why Regulation Holds It Back
• 22:00 What an External Partner Brings That You Can't Build
• 24:00 Boring Is Cool and the Next Two Years Are About Results

AI in retail, travel, and hospitality is reshaping enterprise operations at scale — but the real challenge is not the technology itself. It’s figuring out where to deploy it, how to rewire the processes around it, and how to build before the infrastructure fully matures.

In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Anup Prasad, Senior Vice President and Business Unit Head of Consumer Business, Retail, CPG, Travel & Hospitality at Cognizant, who works directly with some of the world’s most recognized brands across retail, consumer goods, travel, and hospitality — helping them build AI-powered experiences that produce real, measurable outcomes. If you want to understand how a global professional services firm is actually building AI into client operations — not bolting it on — this episode gives you a grounded, real-world view. Together, Pamela and Anup explore how agentic AI is moving from isolated pilots to rewired enterprise workflows — and why modernization and AI are one decision, not two. Anup walks through Walmart’s emerging super-agent playbook (separate agents for customers, suppliers, associates, and developers), Cognizant’s five-agent workflow for Sysco Foods that compressed credit-request processing from three to five days down to 90 seconds, and the newly announced three-way partnership with Anthropic and Travelport to bridge the gap between AI-expressed travel intent and confirmed bookings. They also dig into what it really takes to lead this kind of transformation — from picking the right workflow characteristics to designing human-in-the-loop for high-stakes decisions — and what the Pizza Hut / DragonTail $100M lawsuit reveals about the system-level thinking that separates implementations that work from ones that end in court.

Don’t risk falling behind as AI moves from experimentation to enterprise standard — learn how Cognizant is already reimagining client operations, unlocking new capability, and helping industries build through uncertainty toward a certain future. 

🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

AI in marketing is transforming enterprise operations, but the real challenge is not the technology itself — it's how organizations build the culture, capability, and governance needed to scale AI across a global team. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell (Senior Director, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant) is joined by Josh Walters (Global Marketing Strategy, Operations & Transformation Lead, Cognizant) to break down how AI is moving from individual productivity tool to full agentic transformation inside a 340-person marketing function. If you want to understand how a global enterprise marketing team is actually building AI into workflows — not bolting it on — this episode gives you a grounded, real-world view.

Together, Pamela and Josh explore how Cognizant's marketing team went from giving everyone access to an LLM to building nearly 20 purpose-specific agents — including an Audience Builder that democratizes proprietary CRM data, a closed-loop research assistant trained exclusively on Cognizant's own studies, and a thought-leadership writing coach that scaled one editor's capacity from 6 consultations a week to 50 submissions a day. They also dig into what it really takes to lead this kind of transformation, from change management and skills evolution to measuring value that doesn't show up on any productivity dashboard.

Don't risk falling behind as AI moves from experimentation to enterprise standard — learn how Cognizant's marketing team is already reimagining operations, unlocking new capability, and driving marketing-influenced pipeline at scale.

🔔 Love the podcast? Don't forget to subscribe and rate us!

AI in healthcare is transforming enterprise operations, but the real challenge is not the technology itself—it’s how organizations build the context, trust, and governance needed to scale AI safely and effectively. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell (Senior Director, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant) is joined by Lisa Hersheiser (Client Relationship Manager, Cognizant Healthcare) and Allen Fredrickson (Founder and Executive Chairman, Signature Performance) to break down how AI is moving from experimentation to enterprise-scale impact in healthcare. If you want to understand how AI is actually being applied in real healthcare systems to improve cost, speed, and patient outcomes, this episode gives you a grounded, real-world view.

Together, Pamela, Lisa, and Allen explore how healthcare inefficiencies have driven administrative costs from ~10% to nearly 40% of total spend—and how AI-powered automation is reversing that trend by reducing claims processing time from weeks to days, increasing auto-adjudication rates above 90%, and improving accuracy beyond 99%. They also dig into what it really takes to scale AI responsibly in healthcare, from governance and data readiness to workflow design and cultural adoption across organizations.

Don’t risk falling behind as healthcare AI moves from experimentation to enterprise standard—learn how leading organizations are already transforming operations, reducing costs, and improving patient outcomes at scale.

🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

AI is transforming enterprises, but when it moves from dashboards into factories, grids, and warehouses, the stakes—and the risks—become very real. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell (Senior Director, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant) sits down with Vijay Narayan (EVP and Business Unit Head, MLEU, Cognizant) to explore how context, human judgment, and system design are essential to scaling AI safely in the physical world.

Vijay breaks down why “AI with brakes, not AI limitless” is critical when AI interacts with physical assets, from storm-impacted utilities to complex manufacturing lines. He shares how Cognizant engineers context-rich AI systems, orchestrating multi-agent frameworks and digital twins that allow humans and machines to share responsibility while mitigating risk. From shadow mode testing to cognitive data fabrics, Vijay explains the processes that turn AI pilots into enterprise-scale outcomes.

Together, they discuss how leading organizations amplify their unique strengths, level off inefficiencies, and cultivate a culture of continuous learning to thrive in an AI-powered future. The conversation provides a grounded, human-centered perspective on what it takes to deploy AI with trust, predictability, and real-world value.

🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

AI is already reshaping enterprise work, but the real challenge isn’t the technology. It’s how organizations help people navigate fear, build relevance, and redesign work in a world where humans and AI agents operate side by side. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell (Senior Director, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant) is joined by Ganesh Ayyar (President, Intuitive Operations and Automation and Industry Solutions Group at Cognizant) to explore what enterprise transformation actually looks like in the AI era.

Ganesh breaks down why job cuts are a flawed response to AI disruption and why skilling must be treated as core enterprise infrastructure. He shares how leading organizations are rethinking operating models, governance, and accountability as AI moves from experimentation to scale and why context, not raw intelligence, is what unlocks real enterprise value. From managing human and digital labor together to designing systems where AI augments judgment rather than replaces it, the conversation focuses on what works in practice.

Together, they examine how enterprise leaders can move from fear to agency, build adaptable career paths, and create cultures where ambiguity is expected, and navigated, as AI continues to accelerate. The result is a grounded, human-centered view of how enterprises can compete, grow, and stay relevant in an unsettled world.

🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

Agentic AI is redefining how enterprises create value, collaborate, and compete. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell (Senior Director, Global Brand Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant) is joined by Naveen Sharma (Naveen Sharma, SVP and Global Practice Head, Data and AI at Cognizant) and David Schubmehl (Research Vice President for AI and Automation at IDC) to explore the rise of the agentic economy, a new era where autonomous, interconnected AI agents are transforming how work gets done.

Naveen and David unpack what makes this moment different from past waves of automation, how agentic systems are becoming the new “operating system” for business, and what early adopters are learning as they reimagine workflows and labor models. They share real-world examples from multi-week processes reduced to 30 minutes to enterprises scaling AI-driven decision-making across entire ecosystems and discuss how leaders can prepare their organizations for this next phase of digital transformation.

Together, they examine the opportunities, challenges, and human implications of an economy powered by agents that can sense, decide, and act, setting the stage for a new era of enterprise intelligence.

🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

AI is shifting from better prompts to smarter foundations and that’s where context engineering comes in. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Shanker Udyaver (Vice President and Global Head of Technology Consulting at Cognizant) to explore why context engineering is emerging as the real differentiator in enterprise AI adoption.

Shanker explains how context engineering goes beyond prompt engineering to help enterprises embed their unique organizational knowledge into AI systems. He shares why this shift is critical for reducing hallucinations, improving reliability, and extracting real business value from AI investments. They also discuss Cognizant’s approach to scaling context with context fabric, the role of multi-agent AI systems, and the technical and ethical challenges enterprises must overcome to adopt AI responsibly.

The conversation makes one thing clear: the enterprises that master context engineering will be the ones that win with AI.

🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!