Yesterday’s technology. That is how Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka dismissed Cognizant Technology Solutions’ $2.7-billion acquisition of healthcare technology firm TriZetto Corp last September.“We wish them (Cognizant) the best on that...We are not interested in acquiring a previous-generation company no matter how big or small. We would rather focus on the future,” Sikka said at an analyst briefing last September. But, in the eight months since, Cognizant has harnessed Trizetto into its most potent tool in automation solutions — widely considered to be the future for information technology services companies. TriZetto’s healthcare process automation (HPA) platform is now Cognizant’s most versatile automation platforms. Cognizant is using this as the seed to build automation capabilities across other key verticals — such as banking and financial services, which generates over 40% of the company’s overall annual business.Automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, which Cognizant improved with the TriZetto acquisition, are key to its plan to generate more revenues with less employees. Automation — using robots and machine learning to do tasks otherwise done by humans faster and cheaper — will shape the future of the $146-billion information technology industry in India, which employs nearly 4 million people. With profitability shrinking, IT services companies can’t keep hiring more hands to meet client needs. “Let’s be frank — revenue can’t be linked to manpower addition forever. Such a model is just not sustainable,” said a Cognizant executive involved with the robotics automation project, requesting anonymity.Till recently though, Cognizant was lagging behind peers in its move towards automation. But experts say it may even sneak up ahead. “All top players are neck-to-neck with each other; Cognizant has done an impressive job of catching up,” says Sarah Burnett, vice president of research at Everest Group. “Everyone is being extremely aggressive (on automation), especially if you look at the likes of TCS, Cognizant and Infosys,” she adds. That’s the context in which Cognizant’s automation drive is to be viewed.Over the past two years, Cognizant has managed to infuse elements of machine learning, robotics automation and artificial intelligence in projects across 120 “strategic customers” — those that give out between $5 million and $50 million or more of annual business.Over the next 12-24 months, Cognizant is also aiming to more than double that figure and roll it out across each of its 278 current strategic customers and newer ones the company will add during the period, said another Cognizant executive, requesting anonymity.“By implementing powerful IPA technologies — including artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning — we are driving significant savings, faster time to market, enhanced business insights, better regulatory compliance and transformation of core business processes to help companies become digital enterprises,” Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza said in an email to ET.Few doubt that automation is set to change the very underpinnings of the $146-billion information technology industry.Till recently, IT services companies hired hundreds of thousands of engineers to churn out countless lines of code that would earn it billions in revenues. But since the global financial crisis of the past decade, top technology buyers have been gradually tightened purse-strings. Tech buyers like Target and Wal-Mart are facing the threat of disruption from new-age rivals such as Amazon and are demanding heavy price cuts on traditional, plain-vanilla backoffice software projects even as they are turning to vendors for newer, disruptive technology solutions.To accommodate such price cuts, Indian IT firms are turning to robots and humanoids that can automate outsourcing projects rapidly at a fraction of costs and can solve technical glitches in a fraction of the time it would take a human engineer. Companies that manage to bring in automation faster are more likely to fare better in the next decade and beyond. If it took the IT services 14,000 engineers to add every $1 billion in revenues in 2014-15, the industry has to find ways to add the next $1 billion with barely any manpower addition. That is why Cognizant is betting big on automation.Over the past 6-12 months, Cognizant has poached several top executives from new-age robotics automation firms such as Virtual Operations. First to come on board were Dan Hudson and Matt Smith,both co-founders of Virtual Operations. Then came Shawn Dawson, one of their key lieutenants to further strengthen its ‘automation centre of excellence’. “In addition, our recent acquisition of TriZetto has brought us some highly-talented executives and specialists in healthcare automation, and we are quickly expanding this capability into adjacent industries,” says Gajen Kandiah, executive vice president of business process services at Cognizant.Along with leaders such as Kandiah and Robert Brown, who drives the strategy for the company’s BPS business, Cognizant’s robotics automation team has rolled out artificial intelligence-based automation across thousands of customer projects. Cognizant’s robotics automation strategy is built on three pillars — ADPART and Automatika, both of which were developed internally over the past 12-24 months — and HPA, which the company got via TriZetto.“ADPART’s patented algorithm automates the design of test cases, and by learning from past defects stored in defect libraries, it intelligently predicts the most vulnerable business processes,” Kandiah says. Automatika finds its use mostly in areas such as business process outsourcing. “(Automatika) uses proprietary algorithms for natural language processing and machine learning to automate manual tasks of knowledge workers—for example, analyzing, searching, extracting, and organizing information from different unstructured sources,” says Kandiah.TriZetto’s HPA is perhaps the most versatile and interesting of the three platforms. It finds its primary use in the field of healthcare. Hudson and his team from Virtual Operations are working to replicate its use across other verticals.Cognizant is working on integrating these three platforms together and going to market with them as an end-to-end automation solution. “It’s not just about the robot or... just about replacing human function, but it’s about the symbiosis between a robot and a human over the spectrum of automation and how it comes together to derive the best outcome within a process,” says Kandiah.Despite its progress, experts such as Frances Karamouzis of Gartner warn that Cognizant still has a long way to go before it can call itself a leader in the area of robotics automation. Cognizant has been far too conservative on its automation strategy and needs to get more aggressive against some of its top-tier rivals, Karamouzis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.“It’s still very nascent. It’s very similar to their past strategy, where they’ve been conservative. They always kind of take a more modest approach. For example, they were the last of the big vendors to go to Europe, the last of the big vendors to go to Latin America, the last of the big vendors to get into ERP, BPO, etc,” she says.“The real question is whether they can do what they did in the past, where they’ve caught up even though the others have done it first,” Karamouzis adds.Robotics automation at the heart of India’s multi-billion software exports industry naturally raises the classic debate of man versus machine. What does it really mean for the millions of routine, commoditised jobs that will get automated over the next five to 10 years?“The organisation structure will look a lot leaner over the next 5-10 years and a lot of automation will come in and significantly reduce human capital,” he added.The fact that Cognizant will become leaner in the future does not indicate mass layoffs in the offing. Attrition rates combined with lower net headcount addition will ensure a controlled march towards the non-linearity. But the fact remains that automation spells bad news for a majority of the million-odd engineering students who are graduating from colleges across India every year.Cognizant is not the only one looking to become leaner. Rivals Wipro and Infosys are aggressively making strides in driving the use of artificial intelligence through their organisations to replace manual, repetitive tasks being overseen by engineers.Wipro, which is now taking its cognitive computing system Holmes to clients, has laid out an ambitious three-year roadmap to become a leaner exercise and drive down overall headcount by over a third without resorting to mass layoffs, ET had reported last year.Five years down the line, whoever makes faster progress in robotic automation is likely to end up with more revenues and profits with fewer employees. In business, there is no greater motive.