Other than Job cuts there is another important bit of news is that Cognizant has decided to quit Content Moderation business.

It's a multi million $ operations business.

What do they do?

Facebook has had contract with Cognizant where, Cognizant resources will verify and validate every single post on Facebook so that it does not violate Facebook terms and conditions.

Facebook's gets millions of post everyday which includes pornography , violence like beheading etc etc. Cognizant resources have to validate such posts and report them so that FB can remove them as per their policy.

This process also enabled Facebook to build a machine learning (ML) algorithm that automatically identifies such posts. In last 3 years , FB ML algorithm has become sophisticated enough to identify all (98% accuracy) porn related posts.

Even after developing such sophisticated ML algorithms , FB will still need some QA resources to validate the posts for accuracy. This is content moderation work which all SM platforms are outsourcing.

It's big business which Cognizant has decided to quit.

This reminds me of a great story , One senior leader at the company once told me when I was working with him on a large deal. It's about ethics in business.

In the early 2000s, a very famous anti virus company wanted to outsource the process of identifying hyperlinks of porn websites which could enable them to build software which could identify and negate the virus from these websites.

Cognizant was close to winning the business and a meeting was arranged with senior leadership of the Anti Virus company and Cognizant . Lakshmi Narayan, the then President of Cognizant was invited for the meeting.

Lakshmi Narayan was briefed a few hours before the meeting about the guests and type of business.

Lakshmi was adamant , he would not let Cognizant sign the Contract because he would not want employees in Cognizant offices watching porn wearing the Cognizant ID.

That was not the vision he had for the company.

So Lakhmi Narayan walked into the meeting , explained the clients that though he understood the importance of the operations and motive behind it was ethical but he did not want Cognizant people to be part of it.

It was a great story of leadership. It was very inspiring when I heard it. It's not always about $.

Things changed in between but now it's good to see Cognizant walking out of such business.

Big companies with huge workforce should not do such work.

Over.