IBM Sovereign Core aims to put AI control back in the hands of the enterprise
Companies worldwide are demanding more than regulatory compliance from their technology stacks — they want digital sovereignty with verifiable operational control over AI workloads and the data infrastructure underpinning them.
More than 75% of all enterprises outside the U.S. will have a digital sovereignty strategy by 2030 — a signal that the market has moved well past data residency concerns into something far more consequential. As agentic AI accelerates automated decision-making inside enterprises, that governance gap has become a strategic liability organizations can no longer defer. IBM Corp. made a direct move to close it at Think 2026, announcing the general availability of its Sovereign Core platform — a software-only stack designed to give enterprises a fully in-boundary control plane. To understand why that matters, it helps to trace how digital sovereignty itself has evolved, according to Sripriya Srinivasan (pictured), general manager for Core and ALM software products at IBM.
“It started off as data sovereignty … but it very quickly shifted from that to operational sovereignty. Who runs my platform? Where is my control plane? Where are the keys and secrets?” Srinivasan said. “Much more recently in the last couple of years, it’s been all about AI sovereignty. Where do my models run? Is my inferencing governed? Who has access at all times?”
