- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S.
- The big story: Trump shutting down trade talks with Canada.
- The markets: Mostly up.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. When Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S has a thesis about new technology, he tests it inside his IT consulting and outsourcing company. That’s led to a Guinness World Record in which more than 53,000 employees came together to vibe code in the world’s largest online generative AI hackathon (250,000 participated over the week). Generative AI is also changing his strategy for hiring and structuring the company in ways that challenge conventional wisdom. His advice:
Hire more junior employees: “The pyramid is going to be broader and shorter, and the path to expertise is going to be faster. This year, we are hiring more school graduates than ever before. I can take a school graduate and give them the tooling so they can actually punch above their weight. AI is an amplifier of human potential. It’s not a displacement strategy.”
Focus on interdisciplinary skills: “We are now going to hire non-STEM graduates. I grew up thinking, the more you specialize, the more premium you get. If it’s faster to expertise, then expertise is not the asymmetry. Intelligence is not the asymmetry. Applying intelligence is the asymmetry. If I’m a historian, I could blend it with computational skills and become a futurist. If problem solving is assisted with machines … the mix of people in the core is going to be non-STEM disciplines like anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, journalists; people who can be more purposeful problem finders.”
Adopt a Hollywood model: “It created an agile system where you assemble teams for a project for a broader purpose, and you dismantle it after it is done. The studio was a physical entity, production houses were the capital structures, and everything else was fluid. The constraint [for corporations] was institutional knowledge, tribal knowledge, the heritage of the company, the enabling layers of finance, HR, all of it …We can feed that tribal knowledge in whatever form we get into the LLM to build an agent on the other side, which is very contextual … You make the AI capital permanent, the agentic capital permanent, and you unleash people to be the variable component.
Go with your gut: “You build your thesis or your hypothesis on gut, which is a combination of experience, intuition, and connecting the dots, and then you layer it with data, and you get close to 60, 70% and then you’d stop layering it with any more data, because you’d be late. And then you go back to your gut and push it through. Rethinking your assumptions in a world which is moving at a high pace is important.”
Click here for the full interview with Kumar. And I’m arriving in Riyadh today for the 2025 Fortune Global Forum. I hope you’ll join us on Oct. 26 and 27 via livestream, which you can watch here.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top news
Trump shutting down trade talks with Canada
President Trump has cut off U.S. trade talks with Canada after an anti-tariff ad featuring Ronald Reagan aired, calling it “fake” on Truth Social. Before talks collapsed, Canadian officials said Prime Minister Mark Carney was pursuing closer ties with China and may meet President Xi at next week’s APEC summit. As China diversifies exports—now up 8.3% year-on-year despite U.S. tariffs—markets remain calm. UBS’s Paul Donovan said past U.S.-Canada flare-ups have been short-lived but warned that the coming Trump–Xi meeting could pose greater risks for global trade.
Former Whole Foods CEO says he was pushed to sell by activist investors
During an appearance on the Habits & Hustle podcast, Whole Foods cofounder and former CEO John Mackey admitted that he only sold the grocery chain to Amazon because activist investors threatened to fire him and sell anyway. “There’s not an effing thing you can do about it,” Mackey recalls the investors telling him.
What is the real value of Tesla?
Following Tesla’s disappointing quarterly earnings on Wednesday, Fortune’s Shawn Tully argues that the company’s stock is vastly overvalued, propped up by CEO Elon Musk’s promises of future innovations. He estimates Tesla’s true worth at $108 billion—far below the $1.46 trillion valuation set by investors.
Former BLS commissioner warns Fed could be lost without payroll data
Former Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erica Groshen told Fortune that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell may be “flying blind” after payroll processor ADP stopped providing internal data to the Fed in August. Groshen called the development “deeply concerning for monetary policy,” warning that the central bank could now risk either over-tightening or under-tightening.
The markets
S&P 500 futures up 0.34% this morning. The last session closed up 0.58%. STOXX Europe 600 was flat% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was flat in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 1.35%. China’s CSI 300 was up 1.13%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 2.5%. India’s NIFTY 50 was up 0.08%. Bitcoin is up at $111K.
Around the watercooler
With $1 trillion pay package on the line, Elon Musk blasts influential firms telling shareholders to reject it: ‘Those guys are corporate terrorists’ by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez
Amazon will give its delivery drivers AI-powered smart glasses, promising to make the job safer, faster amid automation push by Sasha Rogelberg
AI boom is making your utility bills more expensive, says BofA, and they’re likely to keep going up by Eleanor Pringle
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says AI won’t destroy human jobs—’Yes, job functions will change…but I’m excited about it’ by Emma Burleigh
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Jim Edwards.
