IBM and Sarvam partner to accelerate sovereign AI adoption in India

IT major IBM and Indian AI firm Sarvam on Friday announced a partnership to accelerate the development and adoption of sovereign Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies for the government and regulated enterprises in India.

The partnership aims to demonstrate and pilot technologies tailored for central and state governments, public sector organisations and regulated industries, according to a company statement.

The initiative will integrate IBM Sovereign Core, a software designed to enable control over data and governance, with Sarvam's sovereign AI stack, which features reasoning models and India-first language and voice AI trained locally from scratch.

"Sovereign AI is not simply about where AI runs. It is about giving organisations control over how AI is governed, deployed, and operatedwe aim to help organisations operationalise sovereign AI and accelerate the journey from experimentation to production-scale outcomes," said Sriram Raghavan, General Manager, IBM Software, India and Software Innovation Lab.

 

The collaboration will focus on use cases such as citizen services, grievance redressal, document processing and administrative workflows. This is intended to enable the delivery of secure, multilingual and voice-enabled government-to-citizen services at scale.

As part of the agreement, the IBM GovTech AI Innovation Center in Lucknow will serve as a joint incubation and demonstration hub. The facility will allow government departments, public sector organisations and industry stakeholders to explore the technical and operational requirements of moving AI from pilot stages to full-scale production.

Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam, noted that sovereign AI must operate within the existing systems used by governments and enterprises.

"Our stack puts models, voice, and language technologies on top of (IBM's Sovereign Core), so a citizen can access a benefit or resolve a grievance in their own language, on a phone call," Kumar said.