Cognizant creates tokenised pricing framework for AI era

Cognizant is building AI-led pricing and operating models around tokenisation as enterprises shift from human-led services to digital labour, CEO Ravi Kumar S said.

Speaking at a conference hosted by JPMorgan Chase, Kumar said tokenisation has become a “huge thesis” for the company as clients increasingly seek help managing the complexity and costs of AI-driven operations.

The Nasdaq-listed IT services company is introducing AI-enabled rate cards that move beyond traditional time-and-materials pricing models by accounting for different levels of machine involvement in enterprise work. Cognizant had also referred to these pricing models during its recent quarterly earnings call.

The company is rolling out tokenised rate cards to select clients, pricing work across a spectrum ranging from fully human-led delivery to hybrid and increasingly autonomous AI-driven execution.

During the March-quarter earnings call, Kumar said the approach is intended to align pricing with business outcomes and shared value creation. He added that the model could potentially unlock savings of $200 million to $300 million.

Kumar outlined an AI maturity framework ranging from A0, where work is entirely human-driven, to A3, where processes are fully autonomous. He said enterprises increasingly recognise that while AI systems could reduce the number of work units required, the value and pricing premium for such services could increase because of productivity gains and automation.

“Clients are saying as you go from A0 to A3, the premium on the rates will go up, but the number of units will go down because there are machines attached to it,” Kumar said.

He added that clients are increasingly asking technology providers to manage not just human effort but also machine-driven workloads and AI consumption costs.

According to Kumar, this shift is creating demand for scalable tokenisation frameworks that can manage AI inference costs, digital labour usage and operational efficiency across clients. Cognizant has started developing internal systems to track projects, people and AI workloads to create standardised and repeatable delivery models.

Kumar said the rise of digital labour is fundamentally reshaping the role of IT services companies and forcing the industry to rethink traditional systems integration models.

“We go from a system integrator to an AI builder, from a pyramid of talent to integrated human and digital labour, and from managing project outcomes to managing operational outcomes,” he said.

Cognizant is also reorganising around what it calls “frontier engineers” and “frontier operators”—teams designed to build AI-led systems and manage enterprise outcomes through a mix of human and digital labour.