We believe that open, trustworthy, and replicable use of generative AI, through proven innovation methods, can contribute in a meaningful way to some of the current societal challenges we face.

Swedish public agencies, regions, and municipalities.

Privately owned for-profit entities and non-Swedish public organizations are not eligible for this initiative. 

If you are ineligible and still interested, please email us at InnovationStudioStockholm@ibm.com (subject IBM CREATE). New initiatives are in consideration for 2025.

No. There is no fee and there are no commercial obligations for participants. Participating teams contribute with time and resources only.

Co-creation (4 weeks):

• Business leader: Part-time, acting product owner, helping shape user stories and rapidly answering squad questions.
• 1-2 developers or architects from IT: 25-50% participating in the co-creation.
• End-user representative: Involved during initial workshops and final user testing.

Transition (4 weeks): A few hours per week are required for business leaders, developers/architects and possibly project sponsors. 

Curiosity and ambition to explore are more important than technical skills. 

The initiative is mainly virtual but includes two in-person gatherings mandatory for teams held at IBM Innovation Studio in Stockholm:

1. Kick-off: Two days to meet your squad, participate in a solution workshop, network with peer teams and a record project video.
2. Demo Day: Two days to rehearse and present project outcomes to peer teams and invited industry audience. 

Exceptions will be considered, but the in-person gatherings are carefully designed to ensure project quality, maximize learning and enable peer exchange.

• All applicants will be invited to a 45-minute orientation meeting to answer any questions and discuss their organization’s mission, goals, needs and AI ambitions.
• Shortlisted applicants will be invited to a 4-hour virtual workshop to develop and prioritize AI use cases.
• Together with the industry reference group, IBM will assess and select teams and use cases based on impact and scalability.
• Qualification of participants will take place continuously with September 13th as the last day for feedback.

Qualification of candidates will take place continuously. We recommend applying early to secure a seat. The last day for application feedback is September 13th.

watsonx, IBM’s platform for generative AI, managing governance and developing assistants and agents will be used. The platform will also be made available to teams during the initiative by a Swedish data center managed by Arrow ECS Sverige (see details of Arrow AI lab below).

No prior experience is needed. Introductions are included as preparation for the development sprint work. Experience in machine learning or data pipelines is beneficial, but not required. 

The AI Lab infrastructure is based on both x86 and IBM Power servers running Red Hat Open Shift with support for both K8s Pods and virtual machines.  

Multiple clusters are available with and without GPUs. We have different sizes of GPUs that are available through Nvidia’s DGX with 8 x A100 80GB GPUs, as well as L4 and A40 cards.  

Because we offer different sizes, we can support working/testing to determine the right choice of card for the right kind of LLM. The Labs’ storage needs are made up of both internal and external systems that support most protocols needed like; S3, native IBM Scale, NFS and block. We can offer secure storage for a project by encryption where the partner/customer owns the key, so at the end of the project, the data is secure. 

The Lab is accessed in the most secure way necessary for the partner.  

Options for environment access are through a web portal, SSH or VPN.

Technical artifacts including source code created during the initiative are the property of IBM.

Only public or synthesized data will be used unless otherwise agreed upon by participating teams.

We will assign you an agile squad best suited to your use case and organization, with skills in business technology leadership, technology engineering, solution architecture, value orchestration and data science.

We expect you to be able to have enough understanding and confidence in AI to acquire technology and professional services to develop an initial release of the pilot.

Please email us at InnovationStudioStockholm@ibm.com, and include IBM CREATE in the subject.