Cognizant and Tidal Announce Collaboration to Help Blue Ocean Economies Accelerate Decarbonization, Starting with Blue Food

Agreement will support the "Blue Economy" through digital solutions designed to give aquaculture and other ocean-based industries insights to help reduce their carbon output while improving business outcomes. 3.3bn people rely on the ocean for food and economic security.

TEANECK, N.J., June 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) today announced that it is collaborating with Tidal, a project inside X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, to make Tidal's ocean information platform widely available to the aquaculture market. Until now, Tidal's platform has been available to select pilot partners only, offering data-driven insights designed to improve the sustainability and efficiency of their operations. Cognizant will use its software and systems integration expertise to bring the Tidal platform to the broader aquaculture market.

Longer term, Cognizant and Tidal will explore additional ways to apply the platform to make an impact on industries that depend on ocean insights, including blue transportation; blue energy, and blue carbon. Together with aquaculture, part of blue food, these sectors of the blue economy represent a significant opportunity to decarbonize large ocean-based industries.

The Technology

Tidal has developed a digital technology solution that utilizes innovations in underwater perception, machine learning, AI, and automation to gather and analyze data. Cognizant will collaborate with Tidal to make these technologies more widely available to the aquaculture industry to help them make more intelligent decisions, build more resiliency into their operations, and run more efficiently in a strict regulatory environment.

For the past five years, Tidal has worked with aquaculture industry leaders to develop its solution, which includes a system of underwater cameras, sensors, machine perception tools and software designed to interpret complex ocean environments. The current platform has been built and validated using Tidal's AI, which has been trained on 8 billion underwater observations of fish behavior across 900 terabytes of operational video.

Through its longstanding relationships with global enterprises that make up the Blue Economy, Cognizant will be able to help companies integrate Tidal's technology into their enterprise systems, linking data from across their business to gather insights and make decisions that improve efficiency throughout the entire value chain.

"With digital technology ocean industries can not only become more resilient and future-proof in the face of a more unpredictable and rapidly changing environment, but they can help make oceans healthier and address humanity's biggest problems – from food production to renewable energy to climate change," said Stig Martin Fiskå, Global Head of Cognizant® Ocean. "We welcome this important collaboration with Tidal to work together with clients to support their holistic, systems-level change."

The Opportunity

Ocean based-companies can drive better business outcomes and contribute to decarbonization through lowering the carbon footprint of their operations. For example, in aquaculture fish farmers can use machine perception tools and AI to automate feeding time in accordance with the hunger levels of the fish to reduce wasted feed, a significant carbon emissions source while improving growth metrics.  In shipping, sea transport companies can use machine learning models to analyze micro-weather systems, current speeds and port data traffic to optimize shipping route and port arrival times for lower fuel usage.

"To preserve ocean health, we need to take an innovation-driven and collaborative approach with aquaculture companies and other businesses that make their living on and in the ocean," said Tidal Founder and CEO, Neil Davé. "Through our collaboration with Cognizant, we hope to build on our initial success in the Norwegian aquaculture industry, and eventually expand to other sectors of the Blue Economy to make a meaningful impact in ocean health and global decarbonization."

About Tidal

Tidal, a project inside Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, is developing a new platform to advance our understanding of ocean health and climate change. Tidal is combining machine learning with new types of underwater perception hardware to gain unprecedented visibility into aquatic relationships and ecosystems. For more information

About Cognizant

Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) engineers modern businesses. We help our clients modernize technology, reimagine processes and transform experiences so they can stay ahead in our fast-changing world. Together, we're improving everyday life. See how at www.cognizant.com or @cognizant.