Closing the Velocity Gap: How Telcos can Scale Beyond Al Pilots to Enterprise-Grade Operations
episode
The Fast Mode Podcasts: Breaking News, Analysis and Updates From Telecoms Industry
23 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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What is the Fast Mode Podcast and why was Cognizant recognized with the Analytics & Intelligence Champion award?
Welcome to the Fast Mode Podcast series. I'm Tara Neal, and with me today is Vijay Anand, Senior Vice President at Cognizant. Cognizant helps companies modernize technology, reimagine processes, and transform experiences so they can stay ahead in a fast changing world. In his role, Vijay drives AI-led business transformation amidst hyperpersonalization and the conversion. emergence of telecom services to reimagine customer experience for telcos. Cognizant was recently recognized as a winner of the Fast Mode Awards 2025, taking home the Analytics and Intelligence Champion Award for Performance. Welcome, Vijay. Great to have you on today's episode.
Thank you, Tara. It's a pleasure to meet you. And I want to say a special hello to your listeners as well.
Okay, great. All right. I I I'm sure that you know our audience uh are excited to learn more about um the win, especially the solution that brought you guys the championship. So um without uh further ado, uh you know, let's dive into uh some of the questions that we have. The first one being, you know, um with various rapidly evolving AI and agentic AI use cases, what is cost? Cognizant doing differently to help telcos scale analytics and intelligence from pilots to real business impact.
Sure, Tara. You know, um we have reinvented ourselves as an AI builder company. And so we don't integrate AI in telcos, we actually build it. Now what I mean by that is if you look at the Capex investments that telcos have done, they have spent billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. Our job is to find out how do I take that value that resides in the infrastructure and translate that into the business, whether it is network operations, business operations, and other key areas of strategic growth for telcos. Now, I call this gap as the velocity gap, and this gap is the difference between pilot and enterprise scale production. Yeah. Now, to fulfil this gap we do three things differently. Number one, we reimagine the business process.
In this whole rush to deploy an agents across the enterprise, if you deploy an agent on a on a broken process, you actually don't fix the process. You end up automating the failure. And guess what?
How does Vijay define the “velocity gap” between AI pilots and enterprise‑scale production for telcos?
It's faster at scale and you also leave an audit trail. And so that's why pilots fail, right? Not because that AI was wrong, but they fail because nobody redesigned the workflows. that are around it. And a good analogy for your listeners would be you cannot put a rocket engine in a horse-drawn cart and say that this is a spaceship. You have to design the workflows around it. Secondly, I would say um This is the most critical part. is what I call as building the harness. Agents actually are easy to build. But building Enterprise grade agents are not. What that means is it's not about buying the model. It's about how do you build the evals, the observability, the guardrails, the trust, the governance, and how do you design for human in the loop from day one, right?
That is what actually is the moat for the telco.
Why is redesigning business processes essential before layering AI on telco operations?
So you buy the model. But you keep the harness, and that is what we deliver for our clients. And last but not the least, this is also about workforce transformation. So if you read, for example, our CEO has articulated how we are as a company transforming our workforce to build around frontier certified engineers, frontier certified business operators, and you know how we are enabling our own workforce. So we can deploy these agents at scale and then also train our clients to see how they can effectively and efficiently use agentix solutions to transform their enterprise. So I would say these are the three things that we do differently. And our differentiation has always been playing in the cusp of technology and domain.
So what we do is we package all of these. Around business outcomes and we own the outcome at scale. So let me give you a few examples of this, right? In an earlier world, Uh telcos would not touch their legacy mainframe applications. Today I have telcos where we are modernizing their mainframe environments, but we own the MITS reduction and we own retiring of the legacy infrastructure.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the Fast Mode Podcast and why was Cognizant recognized with the Analytics & Intelligence Champion award?
0:11–2:51
2
How does Vijay define the “velocity gap” between AI pilots and enterprise‑scale production for telcos?
2:51–3:49
3
Why is redesigning business processes essential before layering AI on telco operations?
3:49–5:12
4
What is the AI “harness” and which governance, trust, and observability components does Cognizant embed?
5:12–6:57
5
How does Cognizant’s AI‑builder model help telcos turn network infrastructure into new revenue streams?
6:57–10:07
6
Where does edge AI fit in the telco transformation and how can it unlock compute at the network edge?
10:07–12:57
7
What design principles ensure a seamless hand‑off from AI agents to human operators in customer experience?
12:57–21:49
8
What are the key takeaways for telcos that want to move from AI experiments to enterprise‑grade operations?
21:49–23:24
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Fast Mode Podcasts: Breaking News, Analysis and Updates From Telecoms Industry
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