When COVID-19 Struck, Human & Machine Intelligence Combined To Illuminate A Way Forward Share to Linkedin Cognizant’s XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge highlighted how advanced artificial intelligence and data modeling could inform decisions to safely and quickly reopen the world’s economies and societies, notes Alan Alper, Cognizant’s VP of Global Thought Leadership Programs. As the COVID-19 pandemic quickly spread around the world, it became painfully clear that business-as-usual treatments and mitigation responses would be insufficient to match the pace and intensity of the virus’s spread. As lockdowns put our lives on an extended pause, new thinking was needed to combat the novel coronavirus — a once-in-a-century black-swan event for which even the globe’s most prepared health systems were ill-equipped to contain, much less eradicate.