Vijay Narayan, Business Unit Head, Manufacturing, Logistics, Energy, Utilities at Cognizant, recently spoke with me about what they are seeing in their consulting work with manufacturing and logistics companies. We broached on AI, workforce, and strategy.
Cognizant promotes developing and using digital twins to pilot new machines enabling simulation for optimization. AI for predictive maintenance has been useful for efficiency. He finds progress in adopting automation across the industries he serves as staggered. Same with AI. Companies take one step up and find they can’t go back. The most useful sponsorship for adoption in his experience comes from the CFO. That office asks about how to gain efficiency. At the local level, the plant manager holds the keys to effective adoption.
Following our conversation, I found this press release about a report on analysis of how AI will impact work and jobs.
The new research reveals AI is changing the workforce faster than previously reported: it’s now capable of handling $4.5 trillion in U.S. work tasks and impacting potentially 93% of jobs today. However, the report also underscores that AI is not a blanket solution for advancing labor productivity: human involvement and adaptable operations continue to be vital to capturing the full value potential of AI.
Cognizant’s analysis for New Work, New World 2026 is based on a reassessment of 18,000 tasks and 1,000 jobs in the O*NET labor database, with a focus on how jobs and tasks could be assisted or automated by AI. Specifically, the new study points to an accelerated pace of change in “exposure scores”—the degree to which a job can be assisted or automated by AI—and highlights how those evolving changes can influence labor and enterprise success.
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