As one of the first businesses to sign up for Microsoft AI Copilot for broad enterprise use, tech giant Cognizant has secured 25,000 Copilot seats for its employees.

Additionally, it announced that it bought 500 seats for Sales Copilot and 500 seats for Services Copilot.
In addition to using Microsoft 365 Copilot internally, Cognizant plans to roll it out to a million people among its 2000 global clients in 11 different industries.

Ravi Kumar S, CEO, Cognizant says, “We are investing $1 billion in generative AI over the next three years and Microsoft Copilot is a proven tool that can bring transformative gains, unlocking talent and potential in ways we can only imagine.”

The combined partnership could help drive innovation among enterprise clients, “contributing to the projected $1 trillion1 that AI is expected to inject into U.S. GDP over the next ten years,” the company says.

This partnership also has the potential to significantly accelerate AI adoption and innovation in India. AI is expected to add USD 450–500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, accounting for 10 percent of the country’s USD 5 trillion GDP target, according to reports.

A total of 40,000 developers are scheduled to receive training through Cognizant's Synapse skilling program; 35,000 developers have already received training on GitHub Copilot.

The Microsoft Copilot is a multipurpose assistant that can answer questions from users via chat and automate various tasks throughout the Office 365 suite of products, including PowerPoint and Excel. It is driven by AI language models from OpenAI. It can be purchased for $30 per user per month.

As an alternative, GitHub's Copilot is a specialized coding assistance that costs $10 per month for individuals and $19 for enterprises. It was created using OpenAI's Codex big language model, which is based on GPT version 4.

As per the latest development, Microsoft and Cognizant will work together to leverage Copilot Studio, a tool that lets businesses employ big language models to build AI applications.

Cognizant says that it is developing AI use cases with clients from a variety of industries. One media company, for example, is developing a GenAI-based solution for video content translation and localization, including correct dubbing and subtitles.

As an example, Cognizant mentioned that a communications provider is automating its essential business operations in sales, service delivery, and assurance.