IBM Expands AI and Quantum Research Collaborations in India

IBM has expanded its long-standing research collaborations with IIT Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to advance work in agentic AI, sovereign AI, quantum computing and next-generation computing systems.

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The expanded collaborations will bring IBM researchers together with faculty and students to work on Indic language models, multimodal AI, AI infrastructure, knowledge retrieval, agentic systems, scientific applications and quantum computing algorithms.

IBM-IIT Bombay Collaboration

The IBM-IIT Bombay collaboration, which began in 2018, will focus on three broad areas.

• The first is sovereign and Indic language model adaptation, with research aimed at improving AI capabilities for Indian languages through model adaptation and optimisation techniques.
• The second area is multimodal AI systems for software programming education, human-AI collaboration and intelligent operations across hybrid cloud environments.
• The third covers AI infrastructure and knowledge retrieval, including work on AI runtimes and distributed inference to improve the performance and scalability of large language models.

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IBM-IISc Research Collaboration

IBM’s collaboration with IISc began in 2021 with the launch of the IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud Lab. The expanded research agenda will now cover the following;

• Agentic Systems: Agentic AI workflows that improve orchestration across hybrid cloud environments, enabling more efficient management of AI applications while balancing performance, cost and operational complexity.
• AI for Scientific and Industry Applications: Creating lightweight time-series foundation models based on the IBM Granite model family for energy analytics to support forecasting, anomaly detection, load disaggregation and energy optimization, while contributing benchmark datasets to accelerate broader AI research.
• Quantum Computing: Exploring orchestration for quantum and high-performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery through more efficient quantum-centric supercomputing workflows and next-generation quantum-HPC algorithms. These algorithms would leverage approximation-tolerant classical diagonalization algorithms to improve quantum subspace iteration methods

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Dr. Amith Singhee, Director, IBM Research India and CTO, IBM India and South Asia, said the collaborations bring together IBM’s research expertise and academic research capabilities to work on areas including agentic AI, sovereign AI and quantum computing.

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Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT Bombay said the joint research will cover multimodal AI, knowledge retrieval, agentic AI workflows, AI-assisted software engineering and education.

Prof. Yogesh Simmhan of IISc said the collaboration will explore the convergence of hybrid cloud, AI agents and quantum technologies, including quantum-classical and agentic workflows.

The expanded collaborations will also continue to provide opportunities for students and researchers to work on industry-related research challenges.