IBM and Indian AI firm Sarvam announced a partnership on Friday to accelerate the development and adoption of sovereign Artificial Intelligence 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, 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. Sriram Raghavan, General Manager, IBM Software, India and Software Innovation Lab, said sovereign AI is about giving organisations control over how AI is governed, deployed, and operated. The collaboration will focus on use cases such as citizen services, grievance redressal, document processing and administrative workflows. The IBM GovTech AI Innovation Center in Lucknow will serve as a joint incubation and demonstration hub, allowing government departments and industry stakeholders to explore moving AI from pilot stages to full-scale production. Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam, said the stack puts models, voice, and language technologies on top of IBM's Sovereign Core, enabling a citizen to access a benefit or resolve a grievance in their own language on a phone call.