Cognizant has formed an OpenAI Frontier Capability Group bringing together more than 25,000 of its professionals to deliver OpenAI products, including Codex and ChatGPT, for enterprise clients, the company announced on October 30. The group will start with three kinds of client work: writing software with Codex, moving old mainframe systems to the cloud, and putting AI agents into sales and customer service.

Cognizant says more than 21,000 of its staff have already earned over 40,000 OpenAI training badges, and that an AI assistant it built for a global drugmaker has handled more than 5 million conversations and cut content-creation time by 60% — figures that come from Cognizant itself. The company is an Advanced partner in the OpenAI Partner Network, and its Codex hackathons in India and the Americas drew more than 12,000 participants.

The move is not an exclusive bet. Eleven days before the OpenAI announcement, Cognizant put 18,000 staff behind Google's Gemini, and its Frontier workforce model also credentials engineers on GitHub Copilot and Anthropic's Claude. It does show how far OpenAI's own push into deployment work has spread: OpenAI launched a deployment arm in May and recruited Cognizant and CGI in April to carry Codex into large companies.