The wall of patents at Cognizant’s AI Lab. – courtesy Cognizant

Cognizant in Teaneck announced that its AI Lab has received three new U.S. patents, bringing its total number of U.S. patents to 65 and 88 globally.

The newly granted patents build on the lab’s work in areas such as human-AI collaboration for decision-making and deep learning for specialized tasks.

Together, they reflect continued innovation in the core building blocks of AI systems — helping models learn more effectively, collaborate more seamlessly and support better decisions in real-world environments.

“As enterprises scale AI, they need systems that are not only powerful but also adaptable, collaborative and efficient,” said Babak Hodjat, chief AI officer at Cognizant.

“These patents represent advances in how AI systems learn and evolve, helping organizations move from experimentation to real business impact.”

The latest patents include:

S. Patent No. 12,572,810: Improves decision-recommendation systems, or “prescriptors,” by evolving human-designed strategies into stronger, higher-performing policies as conditions change
S. Patent No. 12,566,942: Automatically creates and tunes activation functions — core “on/off” switches inside neural networks — so models can perform better for a given task and architecture, reducing manual trial and error
S. Patent No. 12,561,223: Enhances distributed machine learning by enabling systems to share and combine learned knowledge through standardized metadata, improving coordination and reuse across teams.

“These patents reflect our focus on the building blocks of AI,” said Risto Miikkulainen, vice president of AI Research at Cognizant and professor of computer science at UT Austin.

“We are making models more adaptive, decisions more effective and distributed systems more collaborative. This work moves AI toward more flexible and scalable real-world applications.”

The innovations were developed by Cognizant researchers, including Dr. Elliot Meyerson, Professor Risto Miikkulainen, Olivier Francon, Dr. Babak Hodjat, Darren Sargent and former Cognizant researchers Karl Mutch and Dr. Garrett Bingham.

The announcement follows shortly after Cognizant was chosen by OpenAI to scale the impact of Codex across enterprise clients worldwide.