IBM and Sarvam Partner to Develop Sovereign AI Solutions

IBM and Sarvam have announced a collaboration to advance the development and adoption of sovereign AI technologies for government agencies, public sector organisations and regulated enterprises in India. 

They will jointly develop and pilot AI technologies and solutions for industry use cases relevant to central and state governments, public sector organisations and regulated industries. The initiative will focus on accelerating the adoption of trusted, governed and sovereign AI through innovation pilots, solution accelerators, technical advisory and knowledge-sharing programmes.

The collaboration combines IBM Sovereign Core, the company’s sovereign-by-design software platform that enables organisations to maintain control over data, operations and governance, with Sarvam’s Sovereign AI stack, which includes India-first reasoning models and language and voice AI developed and trained in India.

The combined platform is designed to support government organisations and regulated enterprises while meeting the country’s regulatory, security and operational requirements.

Companies said that the partnership will initially focus on applications such as citizen services, grievance redressal, document processing and administrative workflows. The companies aim to enable secure, multilingual and voice-enabled government-to-citizen services using sovereign AI infrastructure.

As part of the collaboration, the IBM GovTech AI Innovation Center in Lucknow will serve as a joint incubation and demonstration hub. Government departments, public sector organisations and enterprises will be able to evaluate sovereign AI solutions and assess the technical, operational and governance requirements for deploying AI applications at scale.

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.”

Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam, added: “Sovereign AI has to run inside the systems governments and enterprises already depend on, and at the scale at which those systems operate. 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.”