• The IT giant said that it is more inclined to move towards a digitally-driven company
• The move will benefit many other service providers to enter into this business

The American IT giant has decided to announce its decision to exit content moderation business. Cognizant content moderation business is valued at around $250 m a year. The exit will open the doors for other companies to be a part of this business. There are many social media companies, platforms who want vendors to provide them this service. Facebook, one of the biggest social media platform, is one of the major client of Cognizant content moderation business.

What is content moderation business:

Content moderation is way of monitoring and applying a set of rules to decide if the content submitted by any user is allowed or not. This practice ensures that inappropriate content is filtered out and only verified content is being made public. A lot of content is already being generated from various social media platforms on a daily basis. This has always being a concern for these platform to decide whether the content is appropriate or not. Content moderation removes any such content which violates any defined policy.

Who will be benefited:

A lot of IT vendors are up to grab this business. Most likely to benefit is Genpact including Accenture and Wipro. Most of the Cognizant’s clients will be looking for new service providers and will be planning to re initiate the bidding process for assigning fresh contracts.

Many other companies are also eyeing to gain this business because there is already a lot of opportunity in this field. Companies believes that Cognizant’s exit will prove to be helpful for them because a major competitor will be out of this business. A big client is already with Genpact and along with other companies, it is still trying to win other clients. As per Genpact CEO NV Tyagarajan, “Like all the work that we do, we focus really strongly on operational delivery, excellence and so on. And, therefore, we feel good about the position that we have in that business, the relationship with our clients in that business, so all good.”

Why Cognizant is moving away from content moderation business:

Cognizant said that it want to be a more cost efficient and digital-driven company. This was a timed move because its an era of digital transformation and automation which does not require enough manual work. Content moderation is a task which requires manual efforts for verifying data. The management expects that within one year time frame, it
would exit the business completely followed by transition process.

Also Read: With cost reduction in mind, Cognizant plans to up-skill employees:

Cost reduction and improved productivity is the the key for IT vendors in current era. And this has made employers to push employees to train and re-skill themselves. As a part of this activity, Cognizant is planning to up-skill some of its mid level employees. This will also help the company to improve margins.

The company has already initiated a slew of measures like job cuts, job level adjustment, reskilling and exiting some of its business lines as a part of cost reduction. Cognizant has also planned to increase hiring in sales domains with a vision to target big deals in digital services. Depending on the revenue generation in sales domain, company plans to hire more into this domain.