India, July 31: IBM and Sarvam, India's full-stack sovereign AI company, announced a collaboration to advance the development and adoption of sovereign AI technologies in India. Through the collaboration, IBM and Sarvam will work together to demonstrate and pilot technologies and solutions targeting industry use cases relevant for central and state governments, public sector organisations, and regulated enterprises across India.
This initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of trusted, governed, and sovereign AI capabilities across industry and public sector ecosystems through innovation pilots, solution accelerators, technical advisory, and knowledge-sharing initiatives. It brings together IBM Sovereign Core, IBM's AI-ready sovereign-by-design software that enables full control over data, operations and governance, with Sarvam's Sovereign AI stack, which includes reasoning models and India-first language and voice AI trained from scratch in India. The combined offering is purpose-built for the public sector and regulated enterprises aligned with the country’s regulatory, security, and operational requirements.
Together, IBM and Sarvam will power use cases like citizen services, grievance redressal, document processing, and administrative workflows on full stack sovereign AI. This ensures accelerated delivery of secure, multilingual, and voice-enabled Government-to-citizen services at scale.
The IBM GovTech AI Innovation Center in Lucknow will serve as a joint incubation and demonstration hub, where government departments, public sector organisations, enterprises and industry stakeholders can work through the technical, operational, and governance requirements of moving AI from pilots into production and explore practical applications of sovereign AI.
Sriram Raghavan, General Manager, IBM Software, India and Software Innovation Lab said,
"Sovereign AI is not simply about where AI runs. It is about giving organizations control over how AI is governed, deployed, and operated. IBM Sovereign Core provides an open, enterprise-grade platform and middleware foundation designed to help governments and regulated enterprises scale AI within environments they trust while addressing governance, security, and compliance requirements. By combining these capabilities with Sarvam's India-first AI technologies, we aim to help organizations operationalize sovereign AI and accelerate the journey from experimentation to production-scale outcomes."
“Sovereign AI has to run inside the systems governments and enterprises already depend on, and at the scale at which those systems operate,” said Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam. "IBM's Sovereign Core gives governments an AI-ready technology foundation they control. Our stack puts models, voice, and language technologies on top of it, so a citizen can access a benefit or resolve a grievance in their own language, on a phone call."
