Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cognizant Technology Solutions Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session.
If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star then one. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tyler J. Scott, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.
Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Cognizant's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. I am joined today by Ravi Kumar, Chief Executive Officer and Jatin Pravinchandra Dalal, our Chief Financial Officer.
By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release and investor supplement. If you have not, copies are available on our website, cognizant.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that some of the comments made on today's call and some of the responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements.
These statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties as described in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC. Additionally, during our call today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide useful information for our investors. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures where appropriate to the corresponding GAAP measures can be found in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC.
With that, over to you, Ravi.
Thank you, Tyler. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us.
We delivered a solid second quarter with organic revenue growth at the high end of our expectations and year-over-year adjusted operating margin expansion. Nearly all our healthy sequential growth was driven by our organic business. We accelerated our evolution as an AI builder by building new capabilities, launching new platforms, and deploying Frontier talent. as we begin to unlock entirely new business categories and client value pools.
Looking at the quarter's highlights, revenue grew 4.1% year-over-year in constant currency led by strong performance in North America as large deals signed over the past year moved into full execution. Financial services grew nearly 12% year-over-year in constant currency, the second consecutive quarter of 10%-plus growth. Trailing 12-month bookings increased 5%.
We signed seven large deals each with TCV of more than $100 million, including three new logos. As we expanded adjusted operating margins year-over-year for the sixth straight quarter demonstrating continued profitable revenue growth. From an AI indicators perspective, our revenue and adjusted operating income per associate increased 4.6% and 7.1%, respectively.
Starting this quarter, we are excluding trainees who are not fully deployed for both the current and the comparable prior periods. Over 40% of our software development is now AI-assisted. We have over 8,000 AI engagements, and we view strength in financial services, which includes some of the world's most technically sophisticated companies as a leading indicator for other industries.
Our research reveals that financial services is well ahead with AI initiatives and advanced AI adoption. We are helping clients tackle significant technology debt by using AI to compress modernization timelines that are shifting towards outcome-based pricing. We also now see financial services clients leveraging AI for growth imperatives with new discretionary spend cycles.
We completed our previously announced acquisition of Astreya, a global IT managed services provider with deep expertise in data center infrastructure, enterprise networks, digital workplace services, and AI-first managed operations. Momentum is already building. Astreya will continue its work with Google to deliver services across its corporate and engineering environment, including global ID ops, workplace collaboration infrastructure, and platform services.
We delivered these results against the cautious demand environment while growing at the top of our peer group. While we expect that caution to persist in the near term, AI is driving fundamental change in our industry, we believe creates significant long-term growth opportunities. The key question is why growing AI capability is not yet translated into more enterprise value.
Our research shows two-thirds of the Global 2000 have not yet realized measurable AI productivity gains; one in four have paused AI deployments, and billions of dollars in potential value remain unrealized. The opportunity to address this gap is enormous. We estimate the $1 trillion system integration market can expand into $5 trillion to $6 trillion enterprise operations market with $4.5 trillion of operational labor exposed to AI.
Services firms are structurally positioned to capture this opportunity. As models proliferate and inference costs decline, models stop being the differentiator and value shifts to the applied layer. Which is context governance and business processes.
This layer addresses how each enterprise applies AI, what it learns from it, how effectively it retains, reuses, and compounds that learning. And how well it protects the proprietary intelligence that constitutes its alpha. That is why we launched the Cognizant AI delivery operating system, a continuously learning delivery system that combines human expertise, organizational knowledge, client context, and AI intelligence.
It has three pillars. Our engineering harness, which coaches engineers in real-time, our business operations harness, which feeds best practices into a shared organizational system, and our intelligence spine, which connects intelligence across physical and edge environments. All of this is supported by our context engineering capabilities, which is the ability to assemble an enterprise's work drafts, guardrails, and tribal knowledge.
Working with Cisco, we are using context fabric to build a digital signature of the account management role forming the foundation for an account manager's digital twin and broader identification solution. This AI solution with digital twin added core holds the potential to streamline daily operations and support on-time, in-full complete delivery, improving customer satisfaction. For a large North American bank, we piloted a solution for their fraud management and KYC operational work workflows.
Context was engineered through a custom solution that combines static knowledge from customer and operations interactions and documents with dynamic business context sourced through enterprise application API. The fraud dispute management multi-agent pilot solution has demonstrated the potential to reduce manual effort by more than 50% while the KYC process can significantly improve decision efficacy reducing the risk of fines and fees. Last quarter, I described how AI is reforging our industry's first principles and driving four significant shifts.
First, becoming an AI builder rather than a traditional systems integrator. Owning the full stack required to design bespoke AI systems. Second, rebuilding a talent model by shifting from a traditional pyramid towards interdisciplinary teams working at the intersection of domain operations and technology.
Third, shifting our economics from labor to outcomes. Our mix of fixed-price and transaction-based work has grown for three consecutive years creating a more durable business. And fourth, moving from delivering projects to underwriting results.
Let me share our progress across these four shifts starting with the first one, becoming an AI builder by strengthening our proprietary IP and ecosystem. This year, we launched a dedicated AI market unit, an elite team of business designers, industry strategists, frontier engineers, focused on converting our investments into realized value. We are already seeing early traction.
For example, a large payer client chose us to help build an agentic development practice for its biggest division through pods of Frontier engineers and AI agents. We cut manual effort by 60% for a mid-sized payer while improving the claims throughput, and we compressed AI development cycles from months to days for a leading European online fashion retailer advancing agentic workflows across supply chain inventory returns and customer experience. On the partnership front, we established a dedicated Gemini Enterprise practice as a Google Cloud Diamond partner.
And we joined OpenAI's Daybreak Cyber Partner Program. We also expanded our partnership with Anthropic, becoming one of the small number of global premium partners in the Cloud Partner Network. An example of this partnership at work is Travelport, where we partnered with Anthropic on a strategic AI transformation aimed at modernizing Travelport software development and embedding AI across Travelport's travel retailing, and distribution platforms.
And with A+E Global Media, we partnered with Snowflake to deploy custom intelligent agents that transform complex advertising operations and legal workflows. By automating document validation and enabling natural language queries, we helped accelerate decision-making and significantly improved time-intensive processes. For a second shift, we are rearchitecting our talent model into AI early-career talent led by more senior player coaches.
We introduced two new certified roles, Frontier-certified engineers who audit workflows and build intelligent agents, and Frontier business operators who manage blended human digital teams to deliver outcomes. We plan to scale this Cognizant Forward team to 5,000 Frontier-certified engineers and 10,000 Frontier business operators. We currently have 10,000 cloud-certified architects, the most of any organization globally, and we power one of the largest pools of Codex and Gemini Enterprise trained badges.
Last quarter, we introduced Cognizant SkillSpring, an AI-native platform that embeds agent-driven tutoring directly into daily workflows and gives associates real-time visibility into their AI proficiency and token usage. It is gaining significant momentum with our associates as learning time has doubled and AI users tripled. We have also opened this platform to early prospective clients.
Our third and fourth shifts move Cognizant from a labor-based model to an agentic and platform-enabled model and from delivering outcomes to underwriting results. This is why we established a new AI products and platform group earlier this year to unify Cognizant's proprietary offerings and scale innovation across the portfolio. Our platform strategy has two dimensions.
First, our engineering platforms. Which provide the foundation for everything we build. Including accelerators, agent frameworks, and AI engineering tools that power our AI-native software development lifecycle and agents development lifecycle.
They are increasingly powered by their own agent tech workforce. Together, they compress the software cycle, improve productivity, and accelerate business outcomes for clients. Second, and building on that foundation, our business platforms combine technology, data, AI, and deep industry to create differentiated client value.
Purpose-built for the industries we serve, they embed industry-trained agents directly into critical workflows. TriZetto is the strongest proof point of our platform strategy. Our healthcare platform business generates more than $1.1 billion in annual revenue.
And through the first half of 2026 grew faster than the overall company while delivering substantially higher margins. What began as a software product has evolved into a broad healthcare platform. TriZetto demonstrates how platforms can drive deep client relationships, create recurring revenue streams, and deliver growth and profitability that exceeds traditional services.
It is a blueprint for how we intend to scale platform-led growth across other industries. In healthcare claims, we built a pioneering auto adjudication solution that uses large language models to digitize its adjudication knowledge and rules, enabling agentic AI to analyze claims, apply complex business rules, and reach decisions. With human validation wherever it is needed.
It positions us to take a share in this large high-volume category. Other platform-led modernization wins include a global claims and risk administration leader, leveraging neuro AI, FlowSource, and our 3Cloud-enhanced Microsoft expertise, we signed a five-year agreement to accelerate processing times and upgrade core infrastructure. And TheMathCompany, a global data and analytics company, has deployed Cognizant's neuro business process workflow across multiple business operations processes.
It resulted in over 40% improvement in the research task turnaround times and faster and higher quality resolution of their customers. We are also moving beyond delivery to underwriting results. We signed a major engagement with a leading insurance brokerage committing to more than 50% productivity improvement over five years through AI and operations operating model redesign.
We won on the strength of our domain expertise, reimagining the core workflows and the accelerated delivery using AI tools from our partner ecosystem. As we execute these four shifts, our AI builder model expands where we create value across three categories. First, traditional work done dramatically more productively.
Second, old things in new ways. And third, entirely new things that did not exist before AI. First, traditional work done more productively.
This includes autonomous software engineering or vector one work. Which over the past two years has driven both consolidation and productivity-led engagements. A great example of our success in this area is Novartis.
Which selected Cognizant earlier this year for a five-year engagement to transform its global IT operation. Building on a relationship that spans more than 20 years, we expect to leverage our neuro AI platform to create a unified AI model that combines automation, full stack observability, and agentic capabilities. This is where our AI builder strategy is aimed, helping clients move from labor-intensive operations to intelligent self-service and increasingly autonomous technology environments.
Second, old things in new ways. Here, we see a significant pipeline across secure AI services, mainframe modernization, SAP S/4HANA migration, and SaaS reimagination. Long-standing enterprise challenges that AI can now solve far faster for a fraction of the cost.
Cybersecurity is a clear example. AI is turning security from a cost center into a remediation opportunity as machines expose vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed. We are positioned for this moment by combining frontier models with a 5,000-person security practice and all the leading frontier program partners, including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Red Hat.
We see a strong pipeline forming across these partnerships. Third, entirely new things made possible by AI including context engineering, reinvention of business flows, industrialization of business operations, and physical AI. With physical AI, as intelligence begins to govern physical environments, we believe a new domain of autonomous operations will open.
We launched our sovereign physical AI platform as a service to position Cognizant ahead of this iPhone moment for robotics and infrastructure. This builds directly on a capability we have built over the past decade. More than 10,000 of our associates have trained AI and machine learning models for the world's largest technology companies.
We are now repurposing that expertise for the enterprise through our AI model training and data services. For example, for a global automotive manufacturer we train models on the company's products, technical data and visual content to achieve accuracy that generic models cannot match, automating complex processes and unlocking value from knowledge the company already owned. Public sector is emerging as a meaningful business as organic and inorganic gain traction.
In Q2, Cognizant Government Solutions built on our Belcan acquisition secured a landmark engagement with the state of Iowa to modernize its IT infrastructure. We have a growing pipeline in defense, federal, and state government, including AI infrastructure and citizen experience, while TriZetto expands the opportunity to health agencies, including our work supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in partnership with Signature Performance. This builds on our long-lasting UK public sector practice.
For example, with the Home Office, we developed and support the foundational data platform behind the UK's migration and border systems. In Q2, we won expanded Home Office work across software engineering, testing, delivery, managed services for critical case working systems, improving case worker productivity and reducing manual intervention. And for His Majesty's Revenue and Customs, we recently won an additional work to help configure low-code services in support of build and DevOps functions that is valued at more than $250 million over the life of the deal, including option years.
Our AI builder strategy is also gaining traction outside the U.S. For example, a global pharma company in Europe selected Cognizant as the sole partner to build and scale its enterprise data, AI, and agentic AI capability. Through a three-year agreement covering 68 projects initially. As the client's official AI builder, Cognizant will translate their agentic AI vision into a production-grade governed enterprise platform spanning all business domains globally.
And Cognizant helped a large European bank to industrialize its mortgage process by building a mortgage operations agent, which brings multiple specialized agents together to support complex decision-making, analyze business rule outcomes, propose remediation paths, and generate clear and actionable insights. To conclude, we are in the midst of a profound transformation with a clear vision for the industry's future and confidence in the expansive AI-led opportunity ahead. Our actions, deploying interdisciplinary talent, shifting to outcome-based and opening new value pools are designed to drive sustainable growth.
As we redefine Cognizant, we remain focused on our growth, on our goals, of delivering top-tier growth, consistent margin expansion, and EPS growth ahead of revenue. Thank you to our associates, clients, and shareholders for your continued dedication, partnership, and trust. With that, I will turn the call over to Jatin.
Jatin Pravinchandra Dalal
Thank you, Ravi, and thank you all for joining us. We are pleased with our second quarter performance highlighted by industry-leading growth and steady adjusted operating margin expansion. We achieved these results while continuing to invest including in the completed acquisition of Astreya, new frontier skilling initiatives, expanded partnership, and our AI labs and platform-led offerings.
We also deployed more than $1.1 billion through share repurchases, reflecting our conviction in the long-term opportunity AI creates for Cognizant and our critical role as an AI builder. While market conditions remain complex, we have continued to deliver on our commitments while investing in and evolving our business for the future. Now moving on to the details of the quarter.
In Q2, revenue grew 4.1% year-over-year in constant currency to $5.5 billion. Our sequential organic growth was at the high-end of our expectations. Year over year performance was driven by volume growth, increase in third-party product revenue associated with our integrated offerings strategy.
And inorganic revenue from our investment in 3Cloud. From geographic perspective, growth was once again driven by North America. And from a services perspective, our BPO practice once again led growth while demand remained strong for data and cybersecurity, driven by AI adoption.
We are also seeing strong growth from industry-specific AI-led transformation in financial services, and life sciences. By segment, financial services again led with healthy growth across banking, capital markets, and insurance clients. Growth is also being driven by strong performance in the UK public sector.
We are seeing legacy modernization programmes accelerate as clients advance their AI journeys to address significant technology debt. This is also reflected in sustained bookings momentum. Health sciences was stable.
Demand remains cautious and cost-driven. With plans prioritizing vendor consolidation, legacy modernization, and compliance while discretionary spend faces tight scrutiny. It must demonstrate a clear ROI.
As Ravi mentioned, TriZetto had a strong quarter. Products and Resources were steady. While clients in retail, consumer goods, travel and hospitality continue to navigate pressure from geopolitical uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and elevated oil prices, we are seeing momentum in manufacturing, logistics, energy, and utilities where physical AI and smart manufacturing are creating compelling opportunities for us.
Within communications, media, and technology, demand among comms and media customers is muted. Consistent with last quarter. With technology customers, demand remains strong, driven by AI-native engineering, digital operations, data and cloud services.
As Ravi noted, we are already seeing momentum with Astreya. And we are confident our joint capabilities can generate attractive growth synergies in the years ahead driven by AI infrastructure buildout. Turning to bookings.
We delivered another strong quarter of large deal bookings signing seven deals each with TCV of more than $100 million, including three new logos. On a trailing 12-month basis, bookings grew 5% and represented a book-to-bill of 1.3. Annual contract value decreased modestly.
Reflecting the impact of lengthening contract duration due to a greater mix of large deals. We are pleased with the growth we have delivered in new and expansion bookings, which grew in the mid-teens in the first half of the year. Moving to margins.
During the quarter, we incurred approximately $84 million in costs related to the Project LEAP program we announced last quarter. In addition, as a result of Indian Labor Code and subsequent regulations notified by the Indian government in Q2 we recorded an $81 million one-time benefit for a partial reversal of the India defined contribution obligation liability we had originally recorded in 2019. Excluding these impacts, second quarter adjusted operating margin was 16%.
Up 40 basis points year-over-year. Operational efficiency and favorable currency movements more than offset higher third-party costs and compensation costs. As well as the impact of our recently completed acquisitions.
Now to details of EPS, cash flow and capital allocation. Second quarter adjusted EPS was $1.37, up 5% year-over-year driven by revenue growth margin expansion, and lower share count. EPS was negatively impacted by a higher interest expense associated with $1 billion we borrowed under our revolving credit facility to fund the Astreya acquisition and share purchase activity in the quarter.
DSO was 88 days, up five days year-over-year primarily driven by a change in the business mix. This factor also led to a corresponding increase in payables and therefore the impact was neutral. To cash flow.
Second quarter free cash flow was $459 million, bringing year-to-date free cash flow to $652 million. During the second quarter, we deployed $1.1 billion on share repurchases and bought back over 22 million shares at an average price of approximately $51 per share. This includes $500 million accelerated share repurchase program announced in May.
Year-to-date, we have returned $1.9 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends and remain on pace to return about $2.6 billion. This represents more than 10% of our current market cap. We have also deployed $1.3 billion on acquisitions aligned with our AI builder strategy.
Finally, we ended the quarter with cash and short-term investments of $1.1 billion. Turning to guidance. For the third quarter, we expect revenue to grow 3.8% to 5.3% year-over-year in constant currency.
This includes approximately 200 basis points from our recently completed acquisitions. As we discussed on our last earnings call, our prior guidance range contemplated an improved discretionary spending environment at the midpoint. Instead, macro uncertainty has remained elevated.
We have therefore revised our full-year revenue guidance range to 4% to 5.5% growth in constant currency. This includes 150 basis points of inorganic growth unchanged from our prior expectations, but similar to last quarter, our M&A pipeline remains active. And we are focused on executing with discipline on opportunities aligned with our AI builder strategy.
While discretionary spending has remained pressured, we have maintained good traction on large deals, which we will expect to continue to ramp in the back half of the year. Our revised guidance range assumes the discretionary spending environment remains stable at the midpoint, while the high-end contemplates an improvement in short-cycle revenue in the fourth quarter. There are no changes to our Project LEAP cost estimates or expected savings.
And we continue to expect the program will run through the remainder of the year. Our adjusted operating margin guidance is unchanged at 16% to 16.2%, representing 20 basis points of year-over-year expansion. Our free cash flow conversion guidance for the year remains 90% to 100% of net income.
Full-year tax rate is now expected to be towards the low end of our prior guidance range of 25% to 26%. Based on our current expectations, we expect our third quarter rate to be above the high end of the full-year range. We now expect full-year weighted average diluted share count of approximately 460 million, down from our prior estimates due to the pace of repurchases in Q2.
Interest expense has also increased modestly reflecting a lower cash balance and the drawdown of our revolver this quarter. As a reminder, the previously disclosed enactment of the Indian Labor Code Reforms in 2025 has resulted in a higher run rate of other expenses. We expect this below-the-line cost related to our India defined benefit plan will be around $10 million per quarter for the foreseeable future consistent with the first half 2026 run rate.
This is in line with our estimates in our initial guidance in February, but we are highlighting it to support your model. Our EPS guidance has increased to $5.70 to $5.82 representing 8% to 10% growth versus 7% to 9% growth previously. Finally, we continue to make progress and advance on our evaluation of potential primary and secondary listing in India, and we are working in close collaboration with external stakeholders and regulators.
We will make a decision on this once we have visibility of the revised regulatory framework. We are pleased with the progress made to date and remain committed to acting in the best interest of our shareholders. We will provide updates as appropriate.
With that, we will open the call for your questions.
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone keypad.
You may press star then two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. Participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. In the interest of time, we do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up.
Press star then one to register a question at this time. Our first question today is coming from Margaret Nolan of William Blair. Please go ahead.
Hi, thank you. I am hoping you can give us a little bit more commentary on the business momentum in the context of bookings growth compared to last quarter as well as that second half ramp-up that you had previously expected from large deals. Maybe update us on how those signings and ramps are progressing and how it now shapes your second half expectations.
We have continued to have good bookings momentum. Last quarter, we did 22%. Bookings growth.
TTM this quarter has been 5%. If you take the first half, it is 6%. It is a tough compare also because we had two mega deals last year.
And last year, we grew by almost 18% in Q2 last year. So keeping all this in context, I think we have done pretty well on bookings, and I actually feel very confident about bookings for the rest of year as well. Now one of the nuances which we are excited about in our bookings momentum is financial services is really running hot.
I mean, you have seen in, in Q4, we had, 9% growth, 9+%. In Q1, we had 10%-plus and now 12%. So financial services has literally, has overwhelming you know, increase in bookings.
In the first half, and I expect that to remain very strong in the second half. We did seven large deals, three new logos. We are starting to see activation of $50 million to $100 million deals, which have significantly improved.
I mean, if you take those two large deals out, and compare from last year, $50 million to $100 million deals have gone through a massive bump. $25 million to $50 million deals have gone through a massive bump. Percentage of new business has bumped up by 10% in the first half, in comparison 10%-plus in comparison to the mix. Which is also good because it kind of translates to new build, new revenue.
Incrementally new revenue for the second half. So we have had a pretty good step-up change in our bookings momentum. You know, when we entered the year in 2025, we were at $27 billion TTM, and we got to $28 billion TTM.
And in the last two quarters, we are at $29 billion TTM. So we are starting to move up, and, you know, bookings are going to be a little bumpy between quarters. But if you look at the aggregate numbers and you look at TTM and you look at the tail velocity of the last two quarters, we feel super excited about the second half as well.
Thank you. And then on the BPO business, you have seen good traction there. Can you talk a little bit more about, where you are seeing that attraction from an end market?
Is it really your vertical expertise that is helping there? Or is it more the partnerships that you outlined with the model providers and others that are important in this space? What is driving the success there, and how can you perpetuate it?
Great question. In fact, BPO has always been a blockbuster service line for Cognizant over the last three years. We continue to lead on industry vertical BPO, over the last few years.
In fact, even when I came on board in 2023, the BPO organization was called Intuitive Operations. So it had embedded itself with data and automation and machine learning then, and now AI-led BPO. Margaret, I have actually mentioned this in my remarks as well as in all my commentary in the last year.
The expansive opportunity of system integration services goes from a $1 trillion market where we build software systems for companies to embedding technology, is AI technology, agentic AI, into business operations of firms, and that is going to move our market from a trillion dollars to $5 trillion to $6 trillion. And it is actually much, much more expansive than ever before. And it kind of brings data, technology, and process altogether.
So we are very excited about the BPO business. With the strength of model company partnerships where we cannot just apply it for software engineering, but apply it for business operations. Vertical and horizontal, and also platformize that.
I mean, our TriZetto business is running at at a higher velocity than the rest of the company and the BPAS business underneath it. Which is healthcare operations. Equally running with the same velocity.
So we wanna replicate the platforms AI-led agentic business operations for companies. Just to give you an example, we have a blueprint for F&A, Frontier-led F&A. We have a blueprint for Frontier-led customer operations. We have kind of started to put that in the mix, which effectively means we can embed digital labor and human labor and deliver outcomes through frontier operators as we call it.
It is a new archetype of role and deliver those services to our clients. So we are very excited about the future of our business process operations and agentic-led business process operations. We also have a training capability now, which is the AI data training services.
Historically, we did it for the big-- for the Magnificent Seven companies. Now we are transitioning that capability to AI-led into the Global 2000 because if intelligence is not gonna be drawn centrally and if enterprises are gonna build distributed intelligence, they will have their own specialized models. We think we have a unique service to attach to it.
We have 10,000-plus associates who work on data training services. That is a part of the BPO organization.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Jim Schneider of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Ravi, I think relative to your comments about corporates one out of four sort of pausing their AI progress because of cost or return issues. Can you maybe talk about more tactically? I mean, you have talked about how Cognizant can address that opportunity, but can you maybe talk about more tactically what customers are doing then?
If they pause, what is their sort of immediate action? Are they going back to sort of more traditional implementation work or outsourcing work, or are they just sort of pausing until they can get a better handle on the scenario? And how long would you think it would be on average engagement before you can really see for Cognizant, a big uptick at customers like that?
Jim, great question again. Thank you. Look.
You know, the first chapter of AI adoption was broad-based, open-ended, experimental, and this is a-- the technology was magical. So everybody tried to use it. A way that they could find some magic coming out of outcomes.
As you fractionalize this, which is the second chapter, you are going to go very advanced. You want to start to focus on not token consumption, but token economics. And you are going to start to optimize where you use advanced reasoning and where you do not use advanced reasoning.
So the step back from clients is to say, wait a minute. I am spending a lot of money on tokens. I am spending a lot of money on that entire AI stack.
Am I getting the value? If I am not, let me revisit how to optimize it and get value out of it. The capabilities out there, I have said this, that the production value is way below the bridges to that production value is you know, assembling context, assembling tribal knowledge, setting the guardrails, grounding the technology into the into the heterogeneity of an enterprise.
And we have started to believe now that we have a role to play, a big role to play in that process. Starting from building the harnesses, where you can capture the context so that when you do the transactions on a regular basis, you can create repeatability. Model routing, which means, you know, depending on the kind of task, you could use an open-weight model.
You could use a costly expensive, closed frontier model, or you could use a cheaper closed frontier model, or you may not use a model. And then creating learning loops between human effort and machine effort so that you could integrate human and machine effort together. Which means we have a methodology called basis in our consulting organization, which allows us to reinvent and reimagine those processes.
So if you put all of this together, there is a lot of heavy lift needed before you can actually productionize it and get value. And we are building platforms, and we are building services underneath it. Our clients are coming back to us for a variety of things, starting from productivity, which which is related to software engineering, which was historically for the last two years very mainstream.
Now going back to my previous response, they are coming back to us on business operations. I mean, business operations is where the future is. Because you wanna embed this technology into business operations if $6 trillion of AI ramp on the infrastructure is gonna happen in the next three years. $15 trillion to $20 trillion has to come out of value from enterprise businesses.
And that is not gonna come from system building. Through, you know, AI-first software engineering, but it will actually come from embedding it into business operations. So clients are using it for using us for getting the frontier capacity, the frontier engineering, and frontier operator capacity, platforms, harnesses, context engineering, reimagining the workflows, and, you know, some of our clients are starting to ask us to deliver an AI-infused rate card, which means you embed the pretraining costs and you embed the inference costs into that process.
Software engineering is very mature. Business operations is actually evolving now, and we have a third harness for physical AI, which we are preparing, which we think will be the future as we go forward. So that is the broad story.
So the ability to build that bridge is what will drive companies like us to add value in the process. Thank you.
And then maybe as a follow-up, financial questions or maybe for Jatin. Can you maybe talk broadly to your overall hiring headcount plan in relation to gross margins? I saw it tick down a little bit sequentially.
I am assuming a lot of that was just Project LEAP and some efficiencies there. But maybe talk about your hiring plans over the next two or three quarters and to what extent you expect to be able to hold gross margins, at or above the current level?
Jatin Pravinchandra Dalal
Thank you. Sure, Jim. So you know, as you rightly observed, we have flattish headcount between quarter one and quarter two.
We continue to add the recent college graduates to the company as you indicated in past, and we have made good progress by the end of first half. And we remain on track to get to approximately 20,000 by the end of the year. The Project LEAP is also underway, and as a result, you will see a certain amount of headcount reduction.
So on the balance, we expect that the headcount should remain range-bound. Versus an increase. And that is how we are budgeting or we are planning for rest of the year.
So far as gross margin is concerned, you have I am sure, noticed the improvement that we were able to execute between quarter one and quarter two, which is roughly 60 basis points. We are still trending a little lower than last year. And we will continue to work on it during the course of the year, and I do hope that we continue to show an improvement in that number as quarters progress.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is coming from James Eric Friedman of Susquehanna International. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning and good results here. I wanted to ask about the linearity of the remainder of the year And Jatin, the sequential assumption on the Q4 it looks like if you are at or just above the midpoint on the Q3, you could be you know, flat to slightly down in the Q4 sequentially. but is some M&A in there.
So if you could help us think about how you are thinking about the sequential Q4 in particular on an organic basis, that would be helpful.
Jatin Pravinchandra Dalal
Sure. So, you know, we have modeled it based on, you know, the trends that we see every year. What we have superimposed this year are couple of variables.
One is the larger new and expansion percentage of bookings that we have seen from the beginning of this year. We also have seen the ramp-up of the deals which are in transition phase now and which will move to billable volumes in quarter three, quarter four. And finally, we do have a view on furloughs you know, as you know, the furloughs typically are represented largely by banking and financial services and that is continuing to be very robust this year.
So we have assumed a slightly lower proportion of furloughs coming in quarter four. So the assumption is a slightly superior sequential growth in quarter four compared to what we have seen traditionally in quarter four, which is typically negative because of the bill days impact and furloughs.
Perfect. And then Ravi, I just want to ask about products and resources. it has been a couple of years now since Belcan closed. You had a ton of inorganic in the period of comparison in the Q3.
So at a higher level, though, how is, Products and Resources performing relative to what you had expected when you closed the deal? Thank you.
Yes. So that is a great question. In fact, one of my endeavors is to go beyond financial services and healthcare. and create more diversity in our portfolio.
So we are very pleased with the performance and Products and Resources over the last few quarters. We have got some good traction, new logos. You have seen a section on my earnings around Belcan and its tailwind with other public sector opportunities we have won using the Belcan engine.
That is a great add to our portfolio mix. We are starting to see we are starting to see significant traction with our clients on physical AI, which I spoke about. We have built a harness around it. it is called the intelligence spine.
And we have just now hired a new leader for oil and gas, So we are we are continuing to make good progress on diversifying our portfolio and Products and Resources is one of the important areas to do. I actually believe the AI opportunity will actually be in you know, you will see a leapfrog of digital enhancement on physical things. in Products and Resources, and you will equally see low-margin businesses, which is what I mean by it is our clients. Our enterprise clients.
They are going to use AI to unlock more value than high-margin businesses just because of the productivity opportunity there. So products and resources is gonna be one of our high investment zones in the future, and we will continue to invest to make it a very important portfolio for Cognizant. Thank you so much.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Darrin Peller of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
All right. Hey, thanks, guys. Can you just touch on how you would assess the market right now, especially for the larger deals?
How important is pricing in these discussions, right now? And then just when you are having these discussions with customers, what do they look like when large deals come up for renewal? Just productivity savings they are demanding now versus prior?
Yeah. So look, you know, we have done productivity-led large deals over the last three years. We have outperformed on our margin performance versus what we originally assumed.
We have we have done pretty well in winning more than half of the deals, and that has led to a large deal momentum over the last two years. Now we have progressively gone into newer things, which is my second and third swim lane, which is doing old things in new ways, which is primarily, say, I do a mainframe migration using frontier models or I do SAP HANA migrations, or I do a vulnerability remediation out of security or factory reimagination. All those are starting to become large deals.
And new things in new ways. Which is primarily using AI to do things which did not exist before for growth imperatives or smaller deals because they come more modular. So the mix of deals has changed as we progressed on this process.
And on specifically on productivity, look. Unlike in the past where you had circuit breakers and how much you could do on linear productivity because labor costs are not as nonlinear. Now you have a level of nonlinearity because you could pass on that productivity to clients and outbid what you have actually committed to clients and keep for yourself.
And that is why our margin profile and all our large deals both $50 million-plus and $100 million-plus, is actually you know, trending much better than what we what we originally signed the contracts for. So as long as we stay ahead on AI-led productivity software engineering and business process operations, and we keep staying ahead of it we can pass on the productivity, stay competitive in the market, and still be margin accretive for ourselves. And that flywheel is working very nicely for us.
And that is why we are we are continuing to win large deals, which are productivity-led. We will start to see that move from software engineering to business process operations where the span where the expansive opportunity is going to be much, much more.
Alright. That is helpful. Thanks, Ravi.
I mean, maybe just a quick follow-up would be around what the path looks forward for scaling the Frontier-certified workforce that you described earlier. Just what degree will this come from new hires versus existing? And then just how are you going to keep differentiating as other companies try to develop frontier workforces also?
You know, we are doing it at scale. We are hiring at the bottom of the pyramid from outside. And we are doing it at scale building bridges from inside.
Just look at where we are. Earlier this week, we announced we have the largest pool of Claude-certified architects on the planet. We are 10,000-plus.
Just finished the hackathon today with OpenAI in India. We have 10,000 associates getting badges. We are doing a similar exercise with Gemini.
We are also doing a lot of work with open-weight models. So at scale, bending the cost curve and having the context of businesses to deploy that talent and get value out of it is what will drive companies like ours to be on the cutting edge. You need a combination of things.
You need to know how to reinvent the flows. You need to know how to audit the flows, integrate the agentic work into the business flows. You need to know the context and you need to do it at scale at a lower cost, bending the cost curve.
And that is what we are doing. So I am pretty confident that we will have the largest pool of certified frontier engineers and frontier operators, which is a new archetype of a role we have established. Frontier engineers is about engineering agentic into these flows.
Frontier operators is about operating those flows, which has digital and human labor together. And doing bending that cost curve is what we have done for the last 30 years. At scale, and that is what we are continuing to do.
So it is a combination of building a pipe from outside, building a pipe at the bottom of the pyramid, early careers, and building bridges from inside.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Tien-Tsin Huang of JPMorgan.
Hey. Good morning. Thanks a lot.
I just wanna ask around financial services. It was up double digits. It is growing at a premium over the other sectors.
In the past. We have looked at that sector as a, maybe a leading indicator that other subsectors would follow. Do you see that being the case here?
Should we be encouraged in that could be the case, or is there something unique that maybe is a little bit different in terms of their willingness to adopt some of these AI-driven projects.
Absolutely, Tien-Tsin. Thank you. Look.
Financial services has always been a pioneering industry. High on technology spend, they create asymmetry using technology. And they are on the cutting edge on AI.
In fact, financial services we are probably the number one company on growth in our peer group. All of last year, we did high single digits. At the end of quarter four, we got to 9%.
Q1, we got to 10%. Q2, we are now at 12%. And financial services is activated on all three swim lanes.
Starting from consolidation, productivity, sharing the productivity to modernization of landscape using AI and you know, refactoring landscapes, which is my second swim lane to the third swim lane building new things using AI. And generating growth imperatives. So I am actually super optimistic that financial services will lead the path and other industries will follow.
And other industries will sometimes leapfrog as well. I mean, I now start to see that in industrial clients who are looking at the miss they had in the in the digital revolution to leapfrog directly into physical AI. So you are absolutely right.
I think it is a leading indicator to what is going to come. And if you just look at our you know, if you look at our quarter four exit rate, just as a company, it is also powered by financial services. We are super excited about the fact that we are exiting, you know, if you take the mid, you know, the midpoint of our guidance range, we are exiting on a high, and we will be on the winner's circle.
Good. Thank you for that, Ravi. And then maybe for you, Ravi and Jatin, just thinking-- I have to ask on tokenomics, if you do not mind.
Just thinking about that. Any update with respect to, you know, cost, usage, what you are hearing from your client base, any update there? I know you talked a lot about that at your AI event, but love to hear an update, if there is any.
Thanks.
I think it is continuing to be the hot topic. The conversation has moved from consumption of tokens to optimizing token usage, not using tokens where not needed. Using open-weight where needed, building specialized models using open-weight as the base.
You know, making a difference between using expensive closed frontier models to not expensive closed frontier models. Capturing the learning and creating a learning loop and building an alpha around it. So I mean, all of these have become so much a hot topic of discussion especially customers who are doing business operations.
I mean, software engineering is more mature now. Business operations is not as mature. So this is gonna be a hot topic of discussion for the next 12 months, and it will actually lead to more and more work and more and more services for companies like us.
And it has also been bundling retraining and inference costs along with our services. We now have arrangements with all three frontier model companies to bundle those services and bundle the inference and bundle the pretraining cost, which means we will have to build that craft and that craft is an important craft to build it. It will then mean that the input factor is not just going to be human effort.
It is gonna be human effort, platforms, software, frontier services, all bundled for an output which is not effort-based, but outcome-based.
Mhmm. Thank you for the thoughts. Thank you.
Our final question today is coming from Bryan Bergin of TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I am curious if you can share any kind of rough mix of the managed services business that already incorporates GenAI-led efficiencies?
I am really just trying to understand the balance of the multiyear book. That still needs to go through a cycle of renewals. So that we can kind of better project the potential crossover point when you see potential acceleration from AI activity that can more than offset that existing base compression and other factors.
Jatin Pravinchandra Dalal
Yes. You know, I think it is as you know, our revenue has roughly two components, time and material and fixed-price. And fixed-price is now 50/50.
So our view is that time and material is-- continually every time we renew it and that short-cycle business typically, six to nine months, sometimes 12 to 15 months, but never but never more than two years or 2.5 years. So that is a short-cycle business. So that is continually embedding in itself even on managed services basis the benefit of AI into itself.
On the remaining 50%, which is fixed-price book of business, you know, typically, the contract lines are between 24 and 36 months on an average. Of course, there could be some which are five, seven years and some could be shorter. But typically, on an average, between 24 to 36 months.
If we believe that started this journey of embedding AI into our solution more actively from beginning of last year, which is 2025. We are roughly halfway into it, and we have probably another half to go. Okay.
That is very helpful. Thank you. My follow-up is on Project LEAP.
So just any further details, how much of the plan have you actioned thus far? Any kind of in-year savings from the program that you realized here in February? And just anything important for us to consider as far as the pacing of kind of cost and savings you will see as you go through 3Q and 4Q.
Jatin Pravinchandra Dalal
Sure, Bryan. So we continue to execute the program. We have taken approximately $84 million of cost in quarter two, of which $55 million is related to employee severance and the remaining is related to facilities and software and some of that.
As you know, we have baked in the savings from the program as part of our guidance range, we believe we are executing well towards that goal. I think you should continue to see the rest of the year evenly spread from Project LEAP, between quarter three and quarter four as we move forward.
And we get full-year benefits next year. And it also, you know, reshapes the cost of technology deployment in the market. To a large extent, this is this is about margins, but it is equally about growth.
Can we get more growth using a baseline where productivity is shared with the clients?
That is clear. Thank you.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to turn the floor back over to management for closing comments.
Thank you so much for joining in today. We are very, very excited about our quarter two earnings. We continue to be on the winner's circle.
We have confidence of staying at the winner's circle for the rest of the year. and create some nice tail velocity for the next year. And we are excited about the activation of all three swim lanes. Productivity, you know, doing old things in new ways using AI.
And, you know, as I talked, we are seeing accelerated momentum on new things in new ways using AI, which is primarily driving growth imperatives for enterprises. Thank you again for joining the call today.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's teleconference for Cognizant's second quarter two026 earnings call. You may now disconnect. Or log off the webcast at this time and enjoy the rest of your day.
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