Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar runs a 350,000-person IT services company — and he isn’t sold on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s theory that AI will slash entry-level white-collar jobs in half.
Kumar, a former nuclear scientist, told Business Insider that he has a “whole thesis” that bets on the opposite outcome — that AI will create more jobs for recent graduates, or “freshers,” as he likes to call them.
“My argument is you probably need more freshers than less, because as you have more freshers, the expertise levels needed goes down,” Kumar told BI.
As the CEO of a company that employs hundreds of thousands of workers who write code, Kumar sits at the forefront of an organization that could be significantly impacted by automation tools like Codex, which some believe may eventually replace engineers and developers.
While the CEO said he’s not certain his theory will play out, these are the reasons he’s arguing in favor of it.
AI will lower the barrier to entry
Kumar said AI is leveling productivity across roles. Those at the lower end of the chain are seeing significant gains, while those at the top are seeing smaller improvements, he said. At Cognizant, Kumar said the bottom 50% of developers have boosted their productivity by 37%, compared to 17% for the top half.
Kumar said the “big shift” with AI that separates it from other technology revolutions is that machines will be able to provide expertise. He said deep expertise is becoming less important with the emergence of AI tools, while interdisciplinary skills are becoming more valuable.
“Tech disruptions so far put information on your fingertips,” Kumar said. “This is a technology which is going to put expertise on your fingertips.”
More human labor will be needed overall
Kumar said that as the workforce changes and companies increasingly deploy AI agents at scale, engineers will shift from writing code to manage humans to developing software that manages agents.
“So this whole paradigm opens up more embrace of software, because you’re doing more for less, and when you do more for less, the adoption of software is going to go up,” Kumar said.
Kumar said that as AI brings down the cost of work, companies will absorb that productivity and have the ability to accomplish more. The demand of industries may change, but that doesn’t mean that companies will need fewer people, Kumar said.
“More things will be reimagined, and more human labor will be needed to supplement the AI digital labor,” Kumar said.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon similarly told BI in an interview that demand for new products would outpace efficiency gains. As a result, he expects companies to hire more software engineers over the next few years.
It’s too early to know the true impact on jobs
Kumar isn’t entirely convinced by his counterargument to Anthropic’s CEO.
“I don’t know what’s the right answer, but I at least know that the model is going to change,” Kumar said.
Kumar reflects a broader sense of uncertainty in the tech industry, with company executives preaching the possibility of both outcomes.
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently echoed Amodei’s warning and said AI may trigger a recession, predicting the replacement of some white-collar jobs. The payment company cut its workforce from about 5,500 to 3,000 people in the last two years as a result of an AI productivity boost, though it later dialed up human hiring again after a hiring freeze. Other companies, like Salesforce, have paused hiring engineers for the year following efficiency gains.
Other tech executives, like Google Cloud CTO Will Grannis, recently told BI that AI tools help provide entry-level workers with “superpowers” that allow them to perform better. An Amazon AI leader similarly said junior developers have the most to gain from AI tools.
While Kumar remains largely optimistic about the AI revolution, he said we should all be paranoid. In most periods of disruptive technology, there was one outcome that was seen as most likely, but in the era of AI, multiple outcomes are plausible.
“There’s no guarantee on one of the other,” Kumar said. “So, therefore, you should have the paranoia about what’s going to happen to us and the world around us.”
