TLDR: Babak Hodjat, Chief Technology Officer of AI at Cognizant, has been acknowledged as one of the top artificial intelligence leaders in the UK. This recognition highlights his significant contributions to the field, including his pioneering work on agent-oriented technology that influenced Apple’s Siri, and his current efforts in scaling AI agent networks within Cognizant.
Babak Hodjat, the esteemed Chief Technology Officer of Artificial Intelligence at Cognizant, has been named among the UK’s top AI leaders, a testament to his profound impact and innovative contributions to the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. This recognition underscores his pivotal role in shaping AI advancements and his strategic leadership at a global technology services and consulting company.
Hodjat’s career is marked by significant breakthroughs in AI. He is widely recognized as a co-founder and former CEO of Sentient Technologies, where his patented work on agent-oriented technology laid the groundwork for intelligent interfaces, notably influencing the technology behind Apple’s digital assistant, Siri. His expertise extends to massively distributed computing and evolutionary algorithms, which he applied to diverse areas, including stock market trading through the Sentient Investment Management hedge fund.
At Cognizant, Hodjat is at the forefront of engineering AI for impactful business solutions. He is a key figure in the company’s ‘Data & AI’ initiatives and was featured as a leader at ‘Cognizant Discovery 2025’, an event focused on applying AI across organizations to drive smarter operations, hyper-personalized experiences, and intelligent innovation. His work includes developing ‘Neuro San’, an internal intranet of agents designed to manage and scale AI agent networks across Cognizant’s 350,000 employees, integrating HR, IT, and sales functions. This initiative aims to bring order to the complex task of scaling agentic AI swarms, which, if left unchecked, can lead to poor coordination and ‘digital bedlam’.
Hodjat emphasizes that scaling agents requires robust ‘plumbing, governance, standards, and observability’ rather than just technical brilliance. He has tested networks with up to 10,000 agents, noting that while accurate, they are not always cost-effective. He also highlights the ‘psychopathic’ tendencies agents can display, such as giving away personal data, underscoring the critical need for governance to separate code-enforced rules from model-handled reasoning.
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Discussing the broader landscape of AI, Hodjat agrees that ‘fundamental breakthroughs’ are necessary for the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which he believes is unlikely to manifest as a single event. He notes that current AI tools excel at pattern recognition but lack ‘feelings’, describing ‘cheaty’ ways to make large language models appear to have memory as ‘unsatisfying and quite inferior to humans’. His insights reflect a pragmatic view on AI development, acknowledging both its immense potential and the significant challenges that remain in achieving advanced, human-like intelligence.
