Cognizant's CEO wants to get paid only when the client's result shows up.
He called token consumption a vanity metric and named outcome underwriting, accepting the loss if the result does not land, as the future of the business.
Four days after BCG's fee admission, at Fortune's COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, Cognizant chief executive Ravi Kumar S went further. He said that for the last two years how many tokens a company consumed had become a vanity metric, and that it should not be equated with productivity. Then the harder claim. The industry, he argued, has to move from delivering projects and billable hours to owning outcomes and, finally, underwriting them and being paid for the result.
The word underwriting is the load bearing part. Outcome based pricing ties the fee to a result and keeps the upside. Underwriting means accepting the downside too: if the result does not land, the firm absorbs the loss. That is insurance language, and it puts the firm's own revenue at risk on the client's number. Said from a stage, at a Fortune event, it is the most commercially aggressive pricing claim in the sector right now.
The token jab lands on a rival playbook. For two years the fashionable measure was how much AI a company consumed, with token spend treated as a proxy for maturity. Kumar called that a vanity exercise, and he is not wrong. Consumption measures activity, not whether the activity produced anything a client was willing to pay for. It is a direct shot at the camp that sells AI by the meter and reports the meter reading as progress.
On the same visit, Kumar rejected the fear of a jobs collapse and noted that Cognizant hired more than 20,000 entry level graduates last year, with more planned. The through line is consistent: stop counting inputs, the tokens and the hours and the headcount, and start being accountable for outputs. The credibility test is a single live engagement with a named result and a real loss floor attached. Until that is published, underwriting is a podium claim rather than a contract.