IBM has expanded long-running research collaborations with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science to advance agentic AI, sovereign AI, quantum computing and next-generation computing infrastructure. IBM’s relationship with IIT Bombay began in 2018.
The next phase will focus on sovereign and Indic language model adaptation, multimodal AI, AI infrastructure and knowledge retrieval.
Researchers will work on improving multilingual AI for Indian languages through more efficient model adaptation and optimization.
The collaboration will also explore multimodal systems for software programming education, human-AI collaboration and intelligent operations across hybrid cloud environments.
Additional work will focus on improving enterprise knowledge retrieval and optimizing AI runtimes and distributed inference for large language models.
IBM’s IISc collaboration began in 2021.
Its next phase will concentrate on agentic systems, AI for scientific and industrial applications and quantum computing.
Researchers plan to develop agentic workflows capable of orchestrating applications across hybrid cloud environments while balancing performance, cost and operational complexity.
The partnership will also explore lightweight time-series foundation models based on IBM’s Granite model family for energy forecasting, anomaly detection, load disaggregation and optimization.
In quantum computing, IBM and IISc will investigate quantum and high-performance computing orchestration and quantum-centric supercomputing workflows.
The institutions plan to develop algorithms combining classical and quantum systems to accelerate scientific workloads.
Both collaborations are also designed to provide students and researchers with opportunities to work on industry-oriented problems spanning AI, hybrid cloud, distributed systems and quantum computing.
KEY QUOTES:
“The next wave of computing will be shaped by advances in agentic AI, sovereign AI, and quantum computing. Our collaborations with IIT Bombay and IISc bring together world-class academic research and IBM’s scientific expertise to solve some of the most complex challenges in these areas. Together, we are advancing research that not only pushes the boundaries of computing but also creates practical technologies that can benefit enterprises, developers and society.”
Dr. Amith Singhee, Director of IBM Research India and CTO of IBM India and South Asia
“The power of AI is already being demonstrated in systems that can seamlessly understand and reason across languages, modalities and domains. Our joint efforts with IBM Research are laying the foundation for such intelligent systems through advances in multimodal AI models, knowledge retrieval, optimization techniques, agentic AI workflows, AI-assisted software engineering and education. By bringing together complementary strengths in AI, language, knowledge and intelligent computing, we envision trustworthy, inclusive and scalable AI technologies that can transform how people learn, work and access knowledge in India and across the world.”
Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay
“The future of computing will be shaped by the convergence of hybrid cloud, AI agents and quantum technologies. IISc and IBM bring complementary research strengths to jointly explore intelligent, cloud-native platforms that can reason, adapt and orchestrate quantum-classical, edge AI and agentic workflows at scale, translating frontier ideas into trustworthy, sustainable technologies with real-world impact for India and the world.”
Prof. Yogesh Simmhan, Professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences at IISc
