'Vanity Metric': Cognizant CEO Criticizes AI 'Tokenmaxxing' Trend, Commits to Hiring 20,000 College Grads

The CEO of global IT services firm Cognizant is pushing back against widespread predictions that AI will eliminate entry-level positions, announcing plans to hire over 20,000 college graduates in 2026. He also criticized the trend of focusing on AI usage, which he calls a vanity metric.

Fortune reports that Ravi Kumar S., who leads the $27 billion technology company with a workforce exceeding 350,000 employees, told attendees at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona that concerns about AI-driven job losses have been significantly overblown. His comments come as prominent AI industry leaders have recently moderated their earlier warnings about employment disruption.

“There was a little bit of fearmongering from reading about the fact that there’s going to be a collapse of jobs,” Kumar stated during the conference. “I think there will be more jobs.”

The remarks represent a notable departure from predictions made by high-profile figures including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, both of whom had previously warned that entry-level white-collar positions faced extinction due to AI advancement. Both leaders have since walked back those statements.

Cognizant’s hiring trajectory supports Kumar’s optimistic outlook. The company brought on 20,000 entry-level college graduates in the previous year and anticipates growth in that number for 2026. This expansion occurs despite the company undergoing restructuring efforts and layoffs as it adapts to the AI era.

The new hires will support Cognizant’s AI Builder strategy, which introduces two distinct positions: Frontier Certified Engineer and Frontier Business Operator. Contrary to expectations for a technology-focused company, Kumar emphasized that candidates do not require technical degrees or backgrounds to qualify for these roles.

“It could be a history major with skills to identify and use agentic work. It could be a biology major known as life sciences. It could be an HR accountant who can use agentic Claude terminals around them,” Kumar explained.

According to Kumar, the traditional corporate workforce structure will undergo significant transformation. He envisions a flattened pyramid where entry-level positions and senior leadership roles remain robust, while middle management layers become increasingly lean as AI systems handle intermediate tasks.

“AIs will be in the middle of a flow. You want to have a ton of jobs in the front, you will have a ton of jobs in the back,” Kumar said. “These are going to be validation and verification jobs, and those are going to be authentication jobs. Now, when you have a flat-earth pyramid, the biggest challenge is the middle layers are going to be leaner.”

Kumar also took aim at a common metric used by technology companies to measure AI productivity. Major corporations including Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI have relied on “tokenmaxxing,” or the measure of token consumption as an internal productivity indicator. Kumar dismissed this approach as fundamentally flawed.

“For the last two years, how you consumed tokens, how much tokens you consumed was a vanity metric,” he stated. “I don’t think you should equate this to the number of paid hours. I don’t think you should equate this to productivity.”

Kumar argued that companies should move away from measuring inputs entirely and focus instead on outcomes. His vision involves a shift from traditional project delivery and billable hours toward outcome-based compensation models.

“We have to go from delivering projects, delivering billable hours, owning outcomes, and finally we have to underwrite those outcomes and be paid for those outcomes. I think that is the future,” Kumar said. “I believe we are going to reforge, and whoever reforges this future is going to be a winner on the other side.”

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