New Delhi, Nov. 27 -- Wipro Ltd, India's fourth-largest IT services company, has entered into a strategic alliance with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Foundation for Science Innovation and Development (FSID) to accelerate research in frontier technologies, including agentic and embodied AI, quantum computing and quantum-safe security. The company announced the partnership in an exchange filing on Wednesday.
The initiative marks one of Wipro's most significant academic collaborations in recent years as global IT firms race to build capabilities in next-generation AI and secure digital systems.
Under the agreement, Wipro and IISc will roll out a joint research programme spanning advanced AI models, secure digital infrastructure, quantum technologies and autonomous network systems.
The programme will draw on IISc's senior faculty, researchers and scientists, working in tandem with Wipro's engineering and applied research teams. The aim is to co-develop industry-ready platforms and solutions for high-demand sectors such as telecom, manufacturing, financial services and healthcare - areas where enterprises are increasingly evaluating AI-native and quantum-resilient systems.
The partnership will be anchored by the Wipro Innovation Network, a central pillar of the Wipro Intelligence suite. The network integrates the company's global innovation labs, partner ecosystems, Topcoder community, Wipro Ventures portfolio and existing university collaborations.
The company expects the IISc alliance to accelerate the creation of scalable AI platforms, large enterprise-grade models and new intellectual property that can be deployed across its WINGS and WEGA delivery platforms.
Sandhya Arun, Chief Technology Officer at Wipro, said the collaboration brings together IISc's depth in foundational research and Wipro's strengths in applied engineering. "This partnership enables us to address some of the most complex enterprise problems by combining advanced research with real-world implementation," she said.
Rajesh Sundaresan, Dean of EECS at IISc, said industry-academia alliances are crucial in translating scientific breakthroughs into commercial and societal impact. "We see this collaboration as a natural extension of IISc's commitment to advancing scientific innovation and enabling its adoption at scale," he said.
The joint programme will focus on four emerging domains viewed as critical to the next cycle of digital transformation. These include autonomous network intelligence for future 6G environments; agentic and embodied AI for robotics, industrial automation and distributed decision-making; quantum-inspired secure computing for critical infrastructure; and new digital-trust frameworks built on quantum-safe cryptographic technologies.
With enterprises shifting from exploratory AI projects to large-scale deployment, IT companies are betting on deeper academic partnerships to build differentiated capabilities in a fast-moving market. The IISc collaboration, the company said, is designed to create a pipeline of advanced research that can translate into commercial solutions over the next several years.
In September, L&T Semiconductor Technologies (LTSCT), a Larsen & Toubro subsidiary, partnered with IISc to develop a national 2D Innovation Hub focused on next-generation semiconductor and quantum research. IISc said it will build platform technologies, wafer-scale fabrication capabilities and lead translational research.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.