Stay Cognizant

Stay Cognizant is a podcast for business leaders eager to find new ways to innovate as they embark on their digital transformation journey. Hosted by Pamela Axtell, Senior Director of Brand Strategy and Marketing, each episode features conversations with Cognizant leaders, partners, and clients about the most exciting innovations shaping the future of business. From AI and workforce upskilling to customer experience and responsible technology, these discussions offer practical insights you can apply today. This is the podcast about the people, ideas, and technology that will help you get ahead and stay ahead. If you're looking for actionable ideas to drive meaningful change, you've come to the right place. Welcome to Stay Cognizant.

Stay Cognizant is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 9 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Stay Cognizant, a business show with 9 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #20

  Build the Road Before you Build the Car

  Aug 18, 202628 min

  Two-thirds of senior executives can't point to a single measurable productivity gain from their AI investment. A quarter have already paused or abandoned a deployment outright. According to Ollie O'Donoghue, the reason isn't the technology but the road underneath it. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Ollie O'Donoghue, Head of Research at Cognizant, who leads the team behind Closing the Gap, a study of more than 1,100 senior leaders at G2000 companies across ten industries. Ollie spent years as a cloud analyst before taking over research, watching infrastructure go from a strategic conversation to an assumed commodity, and he makes the case that the assumption is now costing the G2000 roughly $2.4 trillion in revenue and cost savings it will never see. If you want a grounded read on why your pilots stalled and what the organizations ahead of you did differently, this episode gives you the data behind it. Together, Pamela and Ollie dig into what actually determines whether AI investment converts: the ten dimensions of technical infrastructure and the two that carry the most weight; why a single dimension slipping from good to adequate costs you 1 to 1.5% of your productivity outcome; and the four-quadrant view of where your organization really sits, including the finding that surprised the research team most, that focused investment outperforms broad investment even when your foundations are weak. Ollie also explains why compute is simultaneously the biggest inhibitor leaders name and the first line item they cut, what external partners bring that can't be built in-house, and what the organizations at the top are doing with the $1 to $2 billion the rest of the market is leaving on the table. Adequate used to be a passing grade. It isn't anymore and the enterprises seeing real returns are the ones that did the boring work first. Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro – Welcome to Stay Cognizant 2:00 $4.5 Trillion of Capability, Nothing to Show for It 5:00 Why AI Programs Start, Stall, and Get Scrapped 8:00 The Quadrant: Focused vs Broad Investment 11:00 A Formula 1 Car on a Dirt Road 12:00 Ten Infrastructure Dimensions and the End of Adequate 15:00 Compute Is the Weakest Link and the Hardest Business Case 19:00 Who's Ahead by Industry and Why Regulation Holds It Back 22:00 What an External Partner Brings That You Can't Build 24:00 Boring Is Cool and the Next Two Years Are About Results

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  Stay Cognizant

  Real Value, Real People: Accelerating Growth with Human-Centered AI

  Jul 21, 202629 min

  Making AI real inside a complex enterprise isn’t a technology problem — it’s an organizational one. Ninety-two percent of enterprise leaders say their AI results don’t match their ambitions, and according to Sushant Warikoo, that gap exists because technology is only 20% of the solution.In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Sushant Warikoo, Cognizant’s Chief Business Officer for AI, who has spent his career at the intersection of engineering, data strategy, and industry reimagination — building AI practices at Accenture and IBM long before the term was mainstream. If you want to understand how a global professional services firm is actually structuring the team, the commercial model, and the governance to turn AI investment into AI value — not bolting it on, but rewiring around it — this episode gives you a grounded, real-world view.Together, Pamela and Sushant dig into what it actually takes to move from AI pilots to enterprise-grade production: the “agentic harness” of FinOps, governance, and security controls that most organizations skip; the squad model pairing human-centered designers, industry strategists, and frontier engineers in a single unit; and the agent cost estimator that lets Cognizant price and commit to outcomes before a line of code is written. Sushant also walks through what agentic commerce looks like right now — not in five years — and makes the case that the next talent advantage won’t go to the best coders, but to the deepest domain experts.Don’t wait for the infrastructure to mature before building — the enterprises pulling ahead are the ones building the foundation and transforming processes at the same time. Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

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  Stay Cognizant

  Real Value, Real People: Accelerating Growth with Human-Centered AI

  Jul 21, 202629 minS0

  <b>Making AI real inside a complex enterprise isn’t a technology problem — it’s an organizational one. Ninety-two percent of enterprise leaders say their AI results don’t match their ambitions, and according to Sushant Warikoo, that gap exists because technology is only 20% of the solution.In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Sushant Warikoo, Cognizant’s Chief Business Officer for AI, who has spent his career at the intersection of engineering, data strategy, and industry reimagination — building AI practices at Accenture and IBM long before the term was mainstream. If you want to understand h...

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  Stay Cognizant

  How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Experience

  Jun 22, 202640 minS0

  AI in retail, travel, and hospitality is reshaping enterprise operations at scale — but the real challenge is not the technology itself. It’s figuring out where to deploy it, how to rewire the processes around it, and how to build before the infrastructure fully matures.<br /><br />In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Anup Prasad, Senior Vice President and Business Unit Head of Consumer Business, Retail, CPG, Travel & Hospitality at Cognizant, who works directly with some of the world’s most recognized brands across retail, consumer goods, travel, and hospitality — helping them build AI-powered experien...

  ListenShow Notes
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  Stay Cognizant

  How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Experience

  Jun 22, 202640 min

  AI in retail, travel, and hospitality is reshaping enterprise operations at scale — but the real challenge is not the technology itself. It’s figuring out where to deploy it, how to rewire the processes around it, and how to build before the infrastructure fully matures. In this episode of Stay Cognizant, host Pamela Axtell is joined by Anup Prasad, Senior Vice President and Business Unit Head of Consumer Business, Retail, CPG, Travel & Hospitality at Cognizant, who works directly with some of the world’s most recognized brands across retail, consumer goods, travel, and hospitality — helping them build AI-powered experiences that produce real, measurable outcomes. If you want to understand how a global professional services firm is actually building AI into client operations — not bolting it on — this episode gives you a grounded, real-world view. Together, Pamela and Anup explore how agentic AI is moving from isolated pilots to rewired enterprise workflows — and why modernization and AI are one decision, not two. Anup walks through Walmart’s emerging super-agent playbook (separate agents for customers, suppliers, associates, and developers), Cognizant’s five-agent workflow for Sysco Foods that compressed credit-request processing from three to five days down to 90 seconds, and the newly announced three-way partnership with Anthropic and Travelport to bridge the gap between AI-expressed travel intent and confirmed bookings. They also dig into what it really takes to lead this kind of transformation — from picking the right workflow characteristics to designing human-in-the-loop for high-stakes decisions — and what the Pizza Hut / DragonTail $100M lawsuit reveals about the system-level thinking that separates implementations that work from ones that end in court. Don’t risk falling behind as AI moves from experimentation to enterprise standard — learn how Cognizant is already reimagining client operations, unlocking new capability, and helping industries build through uncertainty toward a certain future. 🔔 Love the podcast? Don’t forget to subscribe and rate us!

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