Cognizant and Kohler are doubling down on a partnership that’s quietly reshaping how a 150-year-old manufacturing icon runs its digital business.
The two companies announced a multi-year extension of their strategic partnership, expanding a collaboration that now centers on advanced cloud management, modernized infrastructure, and AI-driven security and observability. The renewed agreement positions Cognizant as a long-term architect of Kohler’s digital and operational foundation—one designed not just for stability, but for continuous, AI-enabled innovation.
For Kohler, best known globally for kitchen and bath products but increasingly defined by its digital ambitions, the move reinforces a broader trend: legacy manufacturers are no longer treating IT modernization as a one-off project. Instead, they’re building continuously evolving digital cores capable of supporting generative AI, real-time analytics, and always-on customer experiences.
From Infrastructure Modernization to Digital Backbone
This partnership didn’t start yesterday. Over the past several years, Cognizant has worked with Kohler to modernize its global digital foundation, scaling application and infrastructure capabilities while improving reliability and delivery speed across the enterprise.
One of the most visible milestones was Cognizant’s role in supporting the carve-out and stand-up of Kohler Energy, a complex operational and IT undertaking that tested the flexibility of Kohler’s systems. Along the way, the companies expanded automation, improved system resilience, and accelerated software delivery—results that helped shift IT from a cost center to a strategic enabler.
The extension of the partnership builds directly on that work. Rather than pivoting to a new vendor or platform strategy, Kohler is choosing continuity—layering advanced AI and cloud capabilities on top of an already modernized base.
What’s New in the Renewed Agreement
Under the expanded agreement, Cognizant will continue to support and evolve Kohler’s global digital ecosystem, spanning:
- Core enterprise systems
- Kohler.com and customer-facing digital experiences
- Data and analytics platforms
- Data center operations and cloud platforms
- End-user services and cybersecurity
The notable shift is the deeper integration of AI-driven operations, including Cognizant Neuro® IT Operations, the company’s AI platform designed to improve system reliability, observability, and operational agility.
In practical terms, this means Kohler’s IT teams gain better real-time visibility into system performance, faster incident detection and resolution, and more predictive insights into infrastructure and application behavior. These capabilities are increasingly critical as enterprises adopt generative AI tools that place new demands on compute, data pipelines, and security.
Why Observability and AI Ops Matter Now
The timing of this expansion is telling.
As enterprises rush to deploy generative AI—from internal copilots to customer-facing experiences—many are discovering that legacy monitoring and operations tools aren’t up to the task. AI workloads are dynamic, resource-intensive, and tightly coupled with cloud platforms, making downtime and blind spots far more costly.
By investing in AI-driven observability and IT operations, Kohler is effectively future-proofing its infrastructure. The goal isn’t just fewer outages; it’s creating a digital environment that can adapt continuously as new AI use cases emerge.
This mirrors a broader industry shift. Companies are moving beyond basic cloud migration toward intelligent cloud management, where AI helps run the enterprise itself—optimizing performance, security, and cost in near real time.
Cognizant’s Bigger Play in Enterprise AI
For Cognizant, the renewed agreement reinforces its positioning as a digital engineering and enterprise AI partner, not just a systems integrator or managed services provider.
The company has been steadily expanding its AI portfolio, with platforms like Neuro and growing emphasis on generative AI embedded across operations, rather than bolted on as standalone tools. Large, long-term partnerships like this one with Kohler give Cognizant a proving ground for those capabilities at scale.
Anup Prasad, Senior Vice President and Head of Cognizant’s Consumer Business Unit, framed the extension as a continuation of momentum rather than a reset. After five years of collaboration, the focus now shifts to embedding advanced AI—including generative AI—across Kohler’s digital ecosystem to enhance performance, resilience, and innovation.
That language reflects a subtle but important shift in enterprise IT conversations: success is no longer measured solely by uptime or cost savings, but by how quickly technology enables new business outcomes.
Kohler’s Digital Strategy Beyond Products
Kohler’s participation in this expanded partnership also highlights how manufacturers are redefining their relationship with technology.
While the company remains synonymous with physical products, its competitive differentiation increasingly depends on digital experiences, supply chain intelligence, sustainability data, and operational agility. Supporting those ambitions requires a digital foundation that is reliable enough for daily operations and flexible enough for experimentation.
Eric Tabor, Kohler’s Chief Digital Officer, emphasized productivity, responsiveness, and customer value—signals that this isn’t just an IT upgrade, but a business strategy. By leaning on Cognizant’s platforms and domain expertise, Kohler aims to respond faster to market changes while supporting its broader mission around gracious, healthy, and sustainable living.
Market Implications: Long-Term Partnerships Over Point Solutions
This announcement also reflects a wider trend in enterprise technology buying.
Rather than stitching together dozens of niche vendors, large organizations are increasingly opting for strategic, multi-year partnerships with firms that can span cloud, data, AI, security, and operations. The logic is straightforward: as systems become more interconnected, fragmentation becomes a liability.
For service providers like Cognizant, that raises the bar. Delivering value now means continuous innovation, not just meeting service-level agreements. For enterprises like Kohler, it means placing significant trust in partners to co-architect systems that will underpin the business for years to come.
The Bottom Line
The extended partnership between Cognizant and Kohler isn’t flashy—but it’s strategically significant.
By deepening their collaboration around cloud management, AI-driven operations, and next-generation observability, the two companies are building a digital backbone designed for constant change. In an era where generative AI is reshaping enterprise expectations almost overnight, that kind of foundation may prove to be one of Kohler’s most important assets.
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