The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have expanded their research collaborations with IBM to accelerate work in agentic AI, sovereign AI, quantum computing and next-generation computing systems. The expanded partnerships bring together IBM researchers, faculty and students to work on emerging technologies with applications across industry and scientific research.
IIT Bombay Focuses on Sovereign and Multimodal AI
The IBM-IIT Bombay collaboration, which dates back to 2018, will focus on:
- Sovereign and Indic language models to improve AI capabilities across Indian languages.
- Multimodal AI systems for software programming education, human-AI collaboration and intelligent operations.
- AI infrastructure and knowledge retrieval to make enterprise knowledge access faster and more scalable.
- Optimisation of AI runtimes and distributed inference for improved large-language-model performance.
IISc Expands Research Into Agentic AI and Quantum Computing
IBM’s collaboration with IISc began in 2021 and will now expand into agentic systems, AI applications and quantum computing algorithm development.
A major focus will be developing agentic AI workflows capable of improving orchestration across hybrid cloud environments while balancing performance, cost and operational complexity.
Researchers will also explore lightweight time-series foundation models based on IBM’s Granite model family for energy analytics. Potential applications include forecasting, anomaly detection, load disaggregation and energy optimisation.
Exploring Quantum-HPC Workflows
The IISc collaboration will also investigate ways to orchestrate quantum and high-performance computing systems. IBM says the research will explore quantum-centric supercomputing workflows and next-generation quantum-HPC algorithms to support scientific discovery.
Building India’s Next Generation of AI Talent
Beyond research, the expanded collaborations are expected to give students and researchers opportunities to work on industry-relevant technology challenges, combining academic research with IBM’s expertise in AI, hybrid cloud and quantum computing.
Why It Matters for Agentic AI
The collaboration highlights how India’s AI research ecosystem is moving beyond generative AI toward agentic systems capable of orchestrating complex workflows across enterprise infrastructure. At the same time, research into quantum-classical computing could open new approaches to computationally intensive scientific and industrial problems.
