According to recent reports, IBM has signed up with 25 startups in an effort to build local solutions through its IBM Cognitive Systems AI Community. The idea is to create a portfolio of real-world solutions aimed at cutting costs and improving efficiencies for enterprise clients.

This initiative was launched by the company earlier this year as an opportunity to join hands, build synergy and help customers in their AI journey. This is an India-specific initiative that focuses on building solutions across various categories.

As a part of this effort, IBM provides hardware and technology requirements along with proving the market access. The hardware provided by IBM help startups run pilots.

IBM Cognitive Systems invites companies and startups to meetup, ideate and learn. It acts as a stumbling block for many startups.

“Digital transformation is opening up channels to communicate with clients and a lot of data is available in the public domain. Companies want to harness the maximum information out of the available data. Businesses want to get value out of their data and either use AI and ML to infuse more efficiency into the process or use similar technologies to try and segment their market better,” said Ravi Jain – Director, Systems Hardware, India-South Asia, IBM.

“AI is pervasive to any organisation and not just large enterprises. We are working with the AI community to solve business problems more efficiently,” Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software & Services, IBM India/South Asia said. He also added that these numbers will grow.

Many startups such as Arya,ai, Artivatic.ai are using IBM platforms to build solutions. It has more than 20 use cases in areas such as video analytics, underwriting for insurance, e-KYC, among others.