Cognizant promotes Australia-based members to APAC leadership roles

A number of Australia-based consultants have taken up senior Asia Pacific regional leadership positions at Cognizant over the past months, in the firm’s technology and consulting business.

Cognizant has made a number of key regional appointments, including George Evans as head of consulting for the Asia Pacific & Japan, Josh Armitage as cloud practice lead, Samir Sawant as AI & analytics lead with Kristen Anderson overseeing GenAI, and David Emery as head of technology consulting for products & resources.

Sanmeet Bhatia has meanwhile been appointed public sector & health vice president.

Based out of Melbourne, George Evans has been with Cognizant since the end of 2020, working his way up from a digital business & technology role to consulting head for A/NZ and now Asia Pacific & Japan. Prior to joining Cognizant, Evans spent a brief stint as a managing director at PwC, before which he served for close to half a decade at Accenture between Australia and the UK, including as APAC digital and customer practice lead.

As Asia Pacific & Japan cloud practice leader, Josh Armitage is one of a number of new appointees stepping up from Cognizant’s Servian branch, which the firm added in 2021. Prior to his past year as a senior engagement partner with Servian out of Perth, Armitage also spent time at another of Cognizant’s acquisitions, Contino, including as AWS practice lead. Earlier in his career, he worked as a DevOps and software engineer for IBM among others.

Crossing at the start of 2020, Samir Sawant joined Cognizant in Sydney from Tata Consultancy Services as the firm’s new A/NZ data, AI & analytics commercial leader, with that portfolio now expanded to the wider APJ region. Originally joining in the US, Sawant previously spent a decade and a half at TCS across roughly two even stints, with time in between in supply chain and sales management roles at HSBC and Siemens IT Solutions in India.

Appointed regional generative AI practice lead, Kristen Anderson is another to switch offices from Servian, where she has been serving as an associate partner and CX practice lead for Victoria over the past three and a half years. Previous to 2020, she spent eighteen months as an analytics & AI director at Deloitte, which she joined following an earlier stint at Servian after starting her career in executive search consultancy in North America.

Meanwhile, Cognizant Servian managing director David Emery has been further appointed as head of technology consulting for Cognizant’s products & resources segment across the Asia Pacific & Japan, which covers a wide range of sectors including retail, manufacturing, logistics, travel & hospitality, and mining, energy & utilities. Emery has spent the past twelve years at Servian, preceded by an equal stint at marketing services firm Salmat.

In other regional appointments, Sanmeet Bhatia earlier this year took over as Asia Pacific public sector & health industries leader, crossing alongside a team of experts from PwC including former digital transformation director Jessica Finn as head of the A/NZ practice. The pair both spent roughly a decade at the Big Four firm based out of Melbourne, with Bhatia being admitted as a customer experience partner at the beginning of 2020.