Cognizant CEO says AI is remaking middle managers into player-coaches who can ‘both executive and develop others’

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks with Ravi Kumar S. about the broad impact of AI.

The big leadership story: Inside Kelly Ortberg’s effort to remake Boeing.

The markets: Mixed globally, with European markets staging a rebound.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning from Scottsdale, where we are on Day 2 of the Fortune COO Summit. (Follow along on our livestream.) These are the leaders who drive transformation and are often tapped to take over, making up nearly one-third of 234 CEO appointments among the S&P 500 over the past five years, according to BCG. The challenge they face is how to accelerate change without blowing budgets or destroying the house. AI is forcing them to reimagine how they hire, manage, lead and structure their organizations. In some ways, as I discussed with a group of COOs yesterday, automation can make the COO’s job harder.

But I want to focus on some insights from Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. I spoke with him on stage yesterday about why he’s hiring more entry-level graduates and the perils of tokenmaxxing. We’ve talked in the past about the Hollywood studio model as a better way to organize work. He thinks deeply about the broad impact of AI and how it will change not just his company but business and society. So I grabbed time with him after our fireside to drill down on some topics. Among them:

Macro delegate and micro steer: “This is a tectonic shift where the technology is in the hands of the users. You decide the things you do yourself and the things you outsource to an........

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