Microsoft is getting some help in expanding its efforts to bring its generative AI services to enterprise customers. Today, the company revealed a new partnership with Cognizant that will result in a major expansion of the use of the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant.
In case you are not familiar with Cognizant, it is a service and consulting company that tries to help enterprise businesses update their technology infrastructure. In today"s press release, Microsoft and Cognizant announced that 25,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot seats have been bought by Cognizant"s clients. It also bought 500 Sales Copilot seats and 500 Services Copilot seats.
Cognizant has also already used its Synapse program to help 35,000 of its software developers get trained on Microsoft-owned Github Copilot. It plans to train an additional 40,000 developers on GitHub Copilot in the future.
Ultimately, Cognizant says it plans to offer Microsoft 365 Copilot "to a million users within their global 2000 clients and across 11 industries." The press release added:
To take advantage of these opportunities, Cognizant and Microsoft will collaborate to deliver industry-specific solutions, using Copilot Studio, a platform that allows users to create and customize their own industry-and-business-function specific Copilots, leveraging generative AI large language models, business applications and enterprise data. Beyond the healthcare industry, Cognizant and Microsoft will prioritize applications across industries such as retail and consumer goods, financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, communications and media.
While it did not name specific companies, Cognizant did say it is already using Microsoft technology to help a number of companies utilize AI technology. As an example, it says that an unnamed media company is using Microsoft AI tech "to develop a generative AI-based solution for translation and localization of video content."
The specific financial terms of this new partnership between Cognizant and Microsoft were not disclosed.