Hemen Parekh argues that Cognizant's new AI Builder Role Catalogue, which gives every designation three states, finally turns the job title into a measuring instrument — the same problem his 2003 ARDIS "Masters" layer and Designation Splitter were built for, and his 2017 re-skilling blueprint. He then proposes a national Role Catalogue: job family, role state and skills delta, hung off the National Employment Grid, so every Indian jobseeker can see where their designation is heading.
The sentence I keep re-reading from this morning's report is not about AI at all. It is about a catalogue. Cognizant's internal memo of 30 October, reviewed by Mint, says the "AI Builder Role Catalogue defines a set of job families and roles, and each role has three states that show how the same job changes as AI takes on more of the work."
Those three states are the interesting part. Current is the job you do today. Evolving is the same job with AI carrying more of it. Future is the one where you "orchestrate and govern AI-enabled work". The mapping already sits in MySkills, launched in September, and the company now wants the title in its systems to match the state in that map — first for associate directors and below in delivery teams across India, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Japan and the Philippines.
What Cognizant has done, without quite saying so, is turn the designation into an instrument. A title that carries a state is no longer a label. It is a progress bar.
I built a small version of that in 2003. ARDIS's top layer, the "Masters", held controlled lists of industry, function, designation level, education and city, and a "Desig. Splitter" broke non-standard titles into standard parts. When I revisited it this May in For a Headhunting Firm: A design for Productivity, the annotation beside the Designation field was still asking "Actual Designation?", because job title proliferation had made cross-company comparison impossible.
Fourteen years later, in a July 2017 email on Re-Skilling Workshops, I set out the same exercise as a sequence: list the industries, list the jobs in each, list the skills each job needs, list which jobs will disappear and why, then list the new jobs — "giving clear trade-names / titles / designations" — and the skills they demand. Substitute AI for automation and you have a Role Catalogue.
The timing is not accidental. On 10 November, Cognizant announced a Claude Frontier Capability Group of more than 25,000 professionals, with 44,000 associates trained or certified on Claude and a Frontier Certified Engineer credential. A day later, the titles were being re-cut to match. Yet the memo is candid that pay, grades, reporting managers and performance processes stay exactly as they are. The title moves before the money does — and I would not read that as cynicism. No sensible firm should reprice a designation before the skills behind it are proven.
But a private catalogue stops at its own gate. If one company can publish one, India can publish a national one: every job family, its three states, and the skills delta between them, mapped to courses, ITIs, colleges and online providers. Hang it off the National Employment Grid I proposed in July 2025, and the same engine that alerts a jobseeker to a vacancy can also warn that their designation is heading for "evolving" within two years.
I would start with twenty job families, not two hundred, and publish quarterly. Implementation will take time, as it always does. But the format now exists, and it arrived in a competitor's memo.
With regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.Iam-Immortal.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
11 November 2026
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