Over the past year, AI has dominated investment dollars and enterprise innovation. The global AI market’s projected growth to $827 billion by 2030 shows this likely won’t slow down anytime soon and will continue to steer business plans and talent strategies in the year ahead.
Cognizant’s leaders weigh in on the trends that will define 2025—from generative AI’s impact across businesses and industries, to how skilling and hiring will continue to evolve in the AI era.
- CIOs will strengthen their digital foundations to fuel growth and resiliency – Neal Ramasamy, Global CIO, Cognizant.
Generative AI is here to stay, and CIOs must be engaged in preparing their organizations for success. In the year ahead, CIOs will continue prioritizing digital investments to help drive growth and strategic efficiencies.
“In 2025, CIOs will be most important in guiding, strategizing, and channeling investments to yield the most impact and benefit to the organization. CIOs increasingly play a seasoned business development role, looking beyond the curve and preparing the organization to adapt and evolve with the changes.”
- Financial services firms must prioritize AI transparency amid regulatory turbulence – Nageswar Cherukupalli, Senior VP & Business Unit Head of Banking, Capital Markets & Insurance, Cognizant.
The rise of AI necessitates a strong focus on ethical considerations and regulatory compliance. Addressing algorithmic bias, ensuring data privacy, and promoting transparency are all crucial for financial services firms, especially as complex multi-agent systems become more prevalent. With evolving regulations, financial firms will increasingly need to document the entire lifecycle of their AI models, including data provenance, to identify biases and details of the training and decision-making processes.
“Financial services firms will need to set themselves up to respond to any changes in regulation over the next year. For example, ensuring they can provide traceability around why generative AI models have made a decision will be essential.”
- AI will further accelerate drug discovery – Scott Schell, Chief Medical Officer, Cognizant.
In the coming year, generative AI will continue to accelerate drug discovery, significantly transforming the life sciences landscape. By streamlining research and development, generative AI enables researchers to synthesize vast literature quickly, significantly cutting research time. Automating clinical trial protocol writing reduces the time required for compliance, speeding up patient access to new treatments.
“We will witness AI further transforming the landscape of drug discovery. By harnessing its capacity for rapid data processing, predictive analytics, and real-world evidence integration, AI will dramatically shorten the timeline for bringing new therapies to the market.”
- As AI powers the green energy transition, a demand for evidence will increase – Stuart Poore, Chief Environment Officer, Cognizant.
The use of AI solutions requires increasingly powerful data centers that consume more energy and water and will require businesses to increasingly turn to AI itself to address the environmental challenges it creates. But with this acceleration, disclosure and transparency are going to be high on the sustainability agenda for many companies, particularly in the EU, as regulations demand much more reporting of data on sustainability management and performance.
“The era of trumpeting big sustainability commitments and targets without clear detail and evidence of delivery is ending. Clients and investors want concrete evidence of delivery, which means real, sustained reductions in emissions and contributions to the circular economy.”
