Fireside Chat with Cognizant [Integreat 2025]

Transcript:

Welcome to our session. My name is Nick Pike.

I’m a newly created SVP and GM, as of late, of SnapLogic EMEA. I did ask SnapGPT about that title and could it make it sound more grand, but that was the best it could do.

But welcome here. I’m sat alongside Niraj Seth, and it’s a real pleasure to have him on the stage with me.

We’ve been working closely together probably for the last year, year and a half. Before that, basically, our teams have all been working on various clients.

But really in the last year, we focused in terms of building our relationships and building a much closer engagement, basically, with Cognizant and particularly with the Manufacturing, Logistics, Energy and Utilities, MLEU Group, which Niraj heads. So Niraj sits on the UK Management Board for Cognizant and also has deep domain experience in terms of actually delivering and doing things for manufacturers, utilities and energy companies in that area as well as running that particularly large and significant business unit for Cognizant.

So welcome to the stage and a pleasure to be speaking with you today, Niraj.

Thank you. Thank you, Nick, and thanks for the opportunity to be here.

Looking forward to it. Hopefully, we can share some interesting insights, keep people entertained, maybe ask a few questions to make sure you stay awake.

But no, looking forward to the session. So thank you for the opportunity.

Great. So let’s kick off, I think, with a kind of a general overview.

So across the diverse and very kind of large companies in manufacturing, logistics, energy, utilities, what are you seeing as the kind of the main trend basically? What is driving most of the conversations you have with your customers today?

So right now, I think it’s a really interesting time, Nick, in terms of clients across all of those industry verticals are talking about how can they be more agile, how can they take advantage of AI in some shape or form and I’m sure anybody that is on the planet at the moment will be seeing AI adverts everywhere. We’re bombarded by them.

And clients are no different because in many respects they’re using AI in their personal lives as consumers individually and they’re asking the question, how can this make a difference in the workplace and whether they’re a B2B or a B2C company. They’re talking about where can AI really have the maximum impact.

But at the same time, they’re also a little bit nervous about how AI will sort of sit on top of what they already have. So for a lot of organizations, they’ve been around for a long time, they have existing infrastructure, existing application estates, existing ways of working, and their question is how can I adapt and evolve without throwing away what I have? So that’s probably a big topic for us right now.

Okay. I mean, I think that’s really relevant.

Using AI in your personal life is one thing. I think, we all kind of spend a lot of time having conversations with ChatGPT that we never used to ask anybody about anything.

But applying it at scale in the types of businesses you work in, what sort of unique challenges does that bring up?

So the scale point is a really interesting one because that’s where a lot of clients are nervous that if they apply something at scale and they’re doing it with an existing landscape where things already work, they have processes which are based on the current application estate and current infrastructure and those processes are proven. They may not be, the most effective in some ways and they want to try and improve them, but they do work.

And their question is, if we bring in AI and change the way that we do business, will we break something? Will we actually end up damaging the relationship with our customers or not being able to serve our customers as well? So I think the biggest challenge they have is asking the question of how can I be sure I’m not going to break what I already have and it will actually enhance?

Okay. That’s really interesting.

And certainly, I think we can see that in some of the customers we’re working on together. So we’ll see National Grid basically on the stage later.

So we’re working closely with them. I mean, in terms of building a partnership, and we spoke about this a little bit the other day, there are a lot of technology vendors in our space.

And a lot of us look very similar if you change the branding on top of the slides. What do you think is important in terms of building a relationship? And how do you kind of then use that to deliver value to those customers? Yes.

So really good point again because if you look at technology companies, whether they are software companies, whether they’re hardware companies or whether they are services and systems integrators, to your point Nick, peel back the covers. They all look very similar.

They all profess to have very similar capabilities and doing things in a very similar way. So what differentiates and what makes companies say I want to work with a particular organization or set of organizations? And increasingly, I think we’re seeing a trend certainly with our customers that they don’t just want one partner to do everything.

I think those days people who’ve been in the industry a while, will know that that concept of giving one vendor everything is long gone. These days companies are saying, I want to be able to pick the best for each individual area, whether that’s infrastructure, whether that’s applications, whether it’s integration, whether it’s hardware.

It doesn’t make a difference. They’re asking for an ecosystem and increasingly customers are saying, I want those partners to already work together and to know their respective ways of working in each organization because what I don’t want to do is to have to govern and manage that ecosystem.

I expect it to work and I expect them to bring value to me. So I think we’re seeing a shift from, you know, those big monolithic contracts to multi vendor ecosystems, but increasingly clients are asking for the companies within that ecosystem to play nicely, to cooperate, to have proven capability where they’ve delivered it before, so that the client doesn’t have to get involved in the day to day and actually manage those vendors or arbitrate if there are differences.

They expect them all to align to a common objective and a common goal, which is about the benefit to that client.

Yes. That makes sense.

I mean, certainly, what we’re seeing in terms of the changing of the landscape in some of our customers, so National Grid one and AstraZeneca, we’re working together as well. I mean, in terms of when you’ve got customers looking to consolidate and to bring the legacy tooling and update it.

How do you kind of approach the scale of those sorts of organizations have when they bring those questions and challenges to you?

I think and look, this is a common theme that a lot of clients are saying how can we do this at scale, but they’re new of us. And to the earlier point, they want the benefits, but they don’t necessarily know how to get there without business disruption.

So I think one of the things that we’ve seen increasingly is clients saying, can I try something out in a small contained area to prove that actually there is a business case that it does deliver in real world the benefits that you’re telling me as vendors? And let’s be honest, we can all turn up with a great sales pitch whether you’re a software provider or services provider, but in actual terms, is that going to deliver benefit? And the way to then prove that to a client is to try something out. So there’s a little bit of chicken and egg, but if you can get clients to commit to doing something, albeit on a smaller scale, they can create a proof point, understand the dynamics on a smaller scale, and then be able to say to their organization this is actually beneficial.

Now how do we roll it out on a wider basis? How do we get scale? And look it sounds obvious but there’s a lot of clients that we’ve seen jointly where they are really reluctant to dip a toe in the water because they’re just nervous about what they don’t know and there are a lot of known unknowns and you’ll only find those out by actually trying something out. So in many respects, I think, you know, the way that we’ve approached this is to say, let’s pick an area where there is value in doing it, but it’s not going to be business disruptive and bring your whole business down because, you know, I think again today, the world we’re living in, it doesn’t matter which industry you’re in, technology is at the heart of your company.

It has the ability to stop you trading, to damage your brand, and potentially never recover. So we can’t treat these things lightly.

We have to be very careful about where we try them out.

That’s very interesting. I think certainly the point around, starting small and then kind of scaling up is really relevant and probably brings us back to the AI culture.

So we kind of spoke about it at the beginning. But what do you see in terms of from your customers in terms of defining those use cases that they want to use as those kind of initial small steps to build confidence? What’s important in terms of both from a customer use case, but also from a vendor relationship in terms of being successful on those very critical early steps?

I think the use case for a lot of clients, especially if they are in the B2C world, we’ve seen increasingly that if they are serving end customers, individual consumers, and they’re doing that with a large employee workforce, what they’re really reluctant to do is to be in a position where people say AI has taken jobs away. And particularly with the economic climate we’re in, I think it’s really fair to say that a lot of companies are acutely aware that they don’t want to be seen to do something which is damaging to their workforce and it’s not going to make good headlines.

But what they are increasingly saying is how can I upscale my workforce? How can I use AI to help my employees to be more productive, to add more value to our customers in the B2C space and even indeed in the B2B space? But actually to do that in a way where it’s enriching their jobs, it’s allowing them to be more effective and particularly industries where they have customer services teams, so people who will be typically in sort of an old school type of call center these days, they can be virtual, but in those kind of organizations a lot of clients are saying how can I drive additional value for my clients, but at the same time drive additional employee engagement and really leverage the knowledge and skills that people have about my business, about customers, and use that in a more meaningful way rather than being dragged into some of the more mundane bureaucratic and admin type tasks? Those are the key things that can be easily managed in terms of AI and improved. So that’s something that we’re trying to help clients with and as a vendor, it’s a great opportunity for us if clients actually say how can I build the business case rather than just coming with an idea and saying I want you to implement something because we have a view of what’s happening across other clients both within one industry and across other industries? And as much as we might say every company is unique and I’m sure any of you will say your company is unique and slightly different to another company even in the same industry, actually there’s commonality.

We can learn from different industries and we can learn from companies in those industries. So our job as an SI is to bring some of that wider perspective.

And not everything will work, but at least if we share the ideas, if we’re given that opportunity, I think it helps clients to really hone down that use case and implement something meaningful.

Yes. I totally agree.

I think we heard very similar from Jeremiah on stage earlier and Ralf from Boehringer Ingelheim talking around, often it’s the individuals inside the organizations who are doing those complex tasks that don’t believe they should be doing those complex tasks and they can be automated, stepping forward basically and then working with their partners, basically and also their business users in terms of defining what their use case is basically and how do they kind of bring that in. Certainly, I think that’s critical in terms of getting from those early stage pilots through to production use cases, even if it’s at reasonably small scale.

So obviously, that’s the upside and the potential. We talked a lot of rounds of legacy and Jeremiah also touched around the application of AI to legacy modernization.

Are you starting to see basically projects that you perhaps wouldn’t have touched or clients wouldn’t have put forward around, basically, a legacy being brought up to you? Is that something, specifically, that your clients are really kind of actively doing in terms of addressing the legacy and their kind of constraints on their business?

Yes. I think it’s taken a few years, and not just in terms of AI, but actually some of the niche solutions which are out there that can replace elements of a big ERP system.

So clients are always nervous about throwing away something that they’ve invested typically multimillions in. It’s taken a long time to deliver and anyone that has worked on a transformation program, I’m sure you’ll all know that typically they run over budget and they run over time and then people say, what’s it improved? Have I really got anything for it other than something with the latest release and it keeps me compliant with the software vendor? So in that sense, I think there’s been reluctance, but we’re seeing a real shift, probably more so this year than in the past.

The companies are saying, actually can I try something out that it’s not necessarily going to replace my whole ERP system, but it could replace elements of it? And then over time, if they replace more and more elements, guess what? Your ERP has then effectively been replaced. But it’s not been done big bang, it’s been done in an incremental way.

So we are seeing across a number of clients the willingness to try that out, particularly if they align that to having more flexibility, more agility and being able to respond faster to clients. And I think again it’s something that perhaps unfairly some of the ERP systems have been tarnished with, but they’re believed to be sometimes slow, sometimes a blocker to change, sometimes that they can’t adapt as as fast as a company wants to adapt to external factors to consumer demand and so on.

So I think if there is a defined kind of benefit that bringing something in to replace some of those monolithic areas, clients are willing to try it out.

Okay. Great.

So talking about running over time, actually, I’ve got a counter that tells me I’ll be talking for an hour and fifty five minutes, which I know isn’t right. Wow.

It may feel like that, Nick. Twelve minutes.

Lovely. Okay.

Actually, I know time flies, but that was definitely taken to Mickey. So let’s let’s dig a little bit into perhaps, one or more of the areas.

So manufacturing, logistics, energy, and utilities. Who came up with putting all those together and which where do you see the synergies and where do you see the differences? I think in terms of who came up with putting them together, they didn’t fit into any of our other industry verticals. So the view was let’s bundle them all together and give them to one person.

But, and it’s actually interesting because although they might sound like they are a diverse set of industries, there there is some commonality and some convergence, not just in terms of the obvious things like customer service. If you’re a utility company, then it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t really matter, that you’re a utility company, you still provide customer service, you’re still doing things which other sectors do.

So in that respect, there is commonality. But in another respect, we’re seeing, for example, if any of you drive an electric vehicle, an EV, you’ll know that your data is wanted by the company that manufactures that EV.

So the, the car company, The people that provide you the energy when you charge. The locations where you charge your EV.

So there’s a convergence in terms of what were discrete industry sectors and the data that exist in those industry sectors is becoming blurred. Those boundaries are becoming blurred.

And maybe not right now, but maybe in a few years’ time, we won’t be talking about some of the discrete sectors. Instead, we’ll be talking almost about a customer journey for particular products and services that come together across today what are different industry sectors.

Okay. That makes sense.

I mean, so certainly looking at another one of our joint customers, Northern Ireland Electric, they’re definitely looking at how do they drive operational efficiency, but largely they must agree to bring that back into how do they improve customer service. So I think you can see that happening across a lot of companies, particularly, particularly with the application of those domain experts who have really been kind of stuck in the bowels of a company historically, are freed up, basically, by automation and AI and then being able to really engage, basically, with the customer base.

It’s yes, I find it really interesting, basically, one of the first use cases for AI was to try and, basically, replace customer service, which is really strange because nobody again, no human being likes to have a conversation, basically, with a bot. So I see it the other way around, basically, is that kind of that focus on operational improvements that free up the individuals in the company to be able to engage with their customers and then build out new products, new services.

So I agree. I think that blurring of verticals, basically, and what drives them will come through.

Indeed. So we’ve probably got a few minutes left, basically.

So, but before we sort of sum up and bring things to a close, I’d like to open up the floor for a few questions. Gentlemen at the front, I think we have a microphone hopefully.

We should have added Nick, only easy questions.

So all my questions have been pre-vetted.

Hi. Martin Parrott.

I work in the home office. Your comment on business disruption, in government that’s no.

We can’t do it. Full stop.

Last year you might remember the, passport readers went down across the country. Questions in parliament, that’s the level of fear that exists within government in terms of making those changes.

So my question to you is that yes, we can start small. There are areas that we can do, but how can we possibly make that step to the larger systems which are going to provide the value with that level of fear over essentially things going down.

That’s a really good point and not just in government and the Home Office in terms of passports but actually across other industries where we could be talking about critical national infrastructure literally keeping the lights on and the difference between having energy and not. So I think in that scenario, what we’re seeing is that companies are willing to try things out on a small scale, but they really have to prove that that small scale actually delivers benefit and is resilient.

And in some ways, to be able to scale it up, they’re having to look at their whole end to end infrastructure and really understand if something does go down, what’s our recovery plan? And instead of it being a theoretical disaster recovery or business continuity, to actually try it out and not I don’t just mean a test, but I mean a real scenario to say, okay, something happens to a part of our infrastructure or application, how do we recover? And how can we build in extra resilience? Are there things that we can do that will then mitigate that that might require further investment? So the use case and the benefit can be there, but it means that underlying investment has to look at a broader area rather than just one sort of business function. Yes.

And just to add to that, I think the thing that we’re seeing that’s most interesting is actually looking at the full workflow in terms of what the process is, and then choosing a part of that process that’s clearly that offers the most benefit but with the least risk. But also looking at kind of where traditional automation and just actually redesigning a process to be better, basically, can be implemented.

So you don’t necessarily if I have a look at the majority of our AI projects, maybe 10%, 15% of them are AI. And a lot of them basically are just actually taking a fresh look at a process that hasn’t been evaluated for maybe sort of home office processes maybe for fifty years or possibly longer.

Hundred. So I think it provides that imperative and you kind of heard in the main session there’s AI being kind of, being the scapegoat for job losses, I think AI can also be the shiny marketing badge, which goes on something which is a much more mundane and ordinary project around just doing some basic process reengineering.

Other questions? Gentlemen at the front. Oh, one in the back.

Hello. Can you hear me? Yes, you can hear me.

Who do you think in a company should own AI? And do you think there’ll be a point where citizens in an organization will be able to create their own agents?

Yeah. So great question.

I actually believe in the democratization of AI across a business and increasingly, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of an IT or IS function that own AI. It should come from anyone in the business and not be restricted.

Now the danger with that obviously is that you can’t just let people loose in terms of doing what they want. You have to have boundaries, you have to have governance, and you have to have guidelines that people adhere to.

But actually if you want to drive true innovation, you need to encompass the whole organization to do that and therefore allow people to own AI in a meaningful way across their different areas because they’re the ones that are experts for a particular function. The IT team can’t be all knowing, although my IT colleagues will tell me, yes, they are all knowing.

But actually, I think AI should be owned across an organization. I don’t know if you want to add to that, Nick.

No, I think it kind of talks we kind of skip through talking around the kind of the future and if we look forward sort of three, five years. I think the point we had about it was really it’s very difficult to predict exactly what’s going to happen.

And certainly, I think it brings together the requirement, as it were for collaboration, for different functions to get together. So back to the point in terms of process reengineering, you need to bring the different experts into the room.

And then each has to recognize the capability that that in the other individual brings. But then, basically, it’s the output of the group that’s going to make the difference, basically, in terms of how it goes forward.

So in terms of who owns it, I think, it’s getting past that, that it has to be owned by an individual. I think we heard from Ralph on the main stage that it’s moving from being a gatekeeper in IT to being an enabler and how do you go out into the business and enable the organization.

There was a lovely quote that I still remember from our previous keynote last year, Brian Dummann from AstraZeneca, who said that the business isn’t going to thank me for slowing things down. I have to work with my organization to move them from being the gatekeeper and the control to being the enabler and the supporter.

So I think that really is kind of the cultural change that we’ll need to take as we move forward in terms of like it doesn’t have one owner. It’s about bringing people together and collaborating.

So I think, we got time for one more question? Yes. We do.

Four minutes. Possibly two more questions, depending on how long the question is and how long I talk for. In highly regulated industries like energy and utilities, how does Cognizant approach the process of getting approval from the regulators to adopt an AI solution? Is that standard? Is that.

Oh, they’re a pushover. They just agree to everything.

If only. No, it’s a really good question because, and probably similar to the point about government and the Home Office that we’re dealing with risk adverse organizations but for a good reason.

They don’t want to just throw ideas away, because that, you know, think it’s too risky. But at the same time, they can’t adopt everything.

They’ve got to understand, at a detailed level what impact it will have and will it risk the status quo in a negative way. So getting approval from regulators, I think with some of our clients we’ve seen that, there are certain things that they do where they will come back to the pilot point, small scale, really prove it, show that it’s robust and then be able to scale it up.

That’s one way. I think the other way is some of the initiatives which are being taken across industry.

Actually the regulators are driving themselves and bringing the utility companies with them to say we have to change, you know, in terms of digitizing the, you know, the sort of the energy landscape if you like and utility companies providing that transparency about where does your money go in terms of the bill, all of those things. So there are certain areas that they can pick and choose and say this is lesser risk, we should just go ahead and change things.

But then there are other areas where they’ll be a bit more cautious. But they’re actually quite forward thinking and we have had quite a lot of dealing with some of the regulators Ofgem and Ofwat in Utilities.

They’re actually very open to new ideas. They want to innovate, but as long as you understand they have to do that within certain boundaries.

Thankfully, I don’t have to deal with the regulators on a daily basis, so I’ll defer to your expertise on that front. So any more questions in the room, actually, before we close and wrap up this session? In which case, I simply, I’ll just maybe summarize a little bit and then just ask one last question of Niraj.

So hopefully, you’ve got an indication today in terms of the importance of the collaboration between the systems integrator and the integration and Agentic vendor here today. Certainly, I think for us, we’ve had some good successful steps on that journey.

But I can see Ian in the room as well, and the team, basically, around. It’s really been helpful at getting to there.

But I really do think, as we kind of spoke beforehand, that the requirement and the demand for having one way of bringing together all of your data, all of your applications, being able to simplify that kind of change and to modernize a lot of the legacy that’s sat there both in terms of processes and IT is a big opportunity for us to really add value to our customers. So from my perspective and my team’s perspective, thank you for everything you’ve done, honestly the work you’ve put in across your team today, but I think the future ahead of us is going to be significantly more at a completely different scale to that.

So I look forward to having those successful projects and then engaging basically with hopefully some people across the room and others that we come across. But for this point of view, thank you for your partnership so far, and I’m looking forward to that extending into the coming months and years.

So anything you’d like to add in sort of a closing comment to the group?

Thank you, Nick. And look, we really appreciate the opportunity to work with SnapLogic, and I think you’ve really grasped the industry in terms of your positioning and getting great traction and working collaboratively.

So thank you for that. I think the one thing I would say is if any of you in whichever organization are struggling with should we try something and how can we try it? Put yourself in the shoes of consumers and these days as consumers we’re so used to when things work and they work seamlessly, we take it for granted.

But when they don’t, we get really frustrated and we kind of say, well why can’t that work? Surely technology can solve whatever the problem is. And one of the biggest frustrations I think is sometimes as consumers, you find yourself having to repeat a problem.

If you’re calling in and let’s say it’s a utility company or a telco retailer, doesn’t matter which company, you find yourself having to repeat everything and it drives people mad and there is a solution to that. Technology can help.

So the thing I would say is if you put yourself in the consumer world when you are operating as a consumer, try and bring that thinking when you’re working for your organization and say how can we apply technology to help that experience and not be afraid of trying things out. And I’m not saying it’s easy, as we’ve said, there are challenges, but hopefully technology can be a force for good and a benefit to society and individuals, rather than it being something which just costs a lot of money and never delivers anything.

So that would be the takeaway.

Awesome, Niraj. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for talking to the group and, thank you.