NTT DATA and Mistral AI Forge Strategic Partnership for Enterprise-Grade AI Solutions

NTT DATA and Mistral AI Partner on Enterprise AI | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The two companies, which announced their partnership on Tuesday (July 29), will combine NTT Data's suite of global IT services with Mistral AI's open-weight generative models. Mistral AI, which is widely considered Europe's answer to OpenAI, is a developer of frontier AI models but has lacked the global enterprise infrastructure and customer support systems at a scale of big companies like NTT Data. With the partnership, Mistral's models will be widely distributed. Meanwhile, NTT Data gets a top-tier AI startup partner to develop generative, reasoning and agentic AI models to offer its clients. NTT Data will also develop a Mistral AI Center of Excellence and launch a technical enablement and certification program for its staff. The companies aim to deliver sustainable and secure AI platforms initially tailored to highly regulated sectors such as financial services, insurance, defense and governments. Mistral's partnership can be compared to OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft, as a majority investor in OpenAI, gets access to its frontier AI models like the GPT series and offers them to enterprise clients through its Azure cloud service. OpenAI gets wide distribution among cloud clients. The NTT partnership comes as Mistral received assistance from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to help it keep up with U.S. rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised billions of dollars in investor capital. Huang had lobbied French President Emmanuel Macron to connect Mistral to established French companies and cultivate potential clients. NTT and Mistral said they will initially focus on three areas: Early projects include a collaboration with Dennemeyer, a global provider of intellectual property management, to create an AI application for advanced patent search and analysis. Another initiative involves the creation in Luxembourg of a sovereign AI platform -- all data and AI workloads must stay in the country -- for clients in financial services and insurance. NTT Data called the project a "landmark" opportunity. "By joining forces with Mistral AI, we will harness the power of high-performing AI models combined with NTT Data's comprehensive AI capabilities, including our 'Smart AI Agent Ecosystem,'" said Abhijit Dubey, CEO and incoming chief AI officer of NTT Data, in a statement. Mistral AI's CEO Arthur Mensch added: "By collaborating with a global leader in digital transformation like NTT Data, we will bring our next-generation AI solutions into real-world business applications." Read more: Mistral Debuts Corporate Chatbot Amid Threefold Rise in Revenue Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch: Open Source Enables Cost-Effective, Powerful AI

NTT DATA and Mistral AI to Shape Future of Sustainable and Secure Private AI for Enterprises

NTT DATA and Mistral AI announced plans to jointly sell and deploy safe and private enterprise-grade AI solutions that are able to foster strategic autonomy for clients. The companies will combine NTT DATA's comprehensive GenAI and IT services portfolio, global delivery capabilities, industry expertise and trusted client relationships with Mistral AI's solutions and advanced generative AI models, which are recognized for their efficiency, performance and enterprise empowerment. Initial focus areas include: Sustainable and Secure AI Co-Development: The companies will develop sustainable and highly secure private AI solutions for organizations in regulated sectors such as financial services, insurance, defense and public sector. The companies will provide end-to-end solutions from infrastructure to business processes powered by AI applications for clients operating on private clouds. AI-Driven Innovation for IT Infrastructure & Customer Experience: The companies will pioneer the integration of Mistral AI technologies into NTT DATA's customer experience platforms, beginning with agentic AI call center solutions in Europe and Asia Pacific. Joint projects could include co-development of LLMs for specific languages, which will further AI innovation tailored to local markets and specialized needs. Go-To-Market Expansion: NTT DATA and Mistral AI will jointly develop and execute regional go-to-market strategies tailored to the unique dynamics of countries including France, Luxembourg, Spain, Singapore and Australia. End-to-end AI services will range from use-case development and customization to implementation, support and managed services. To drive innovation and implementation excellence, NTT DATA will establish a Mistral AI Center of Excellence staffed with subject matter experts and dedicated resources. In addition, Mistral AI will launch a technical enablement and certification program for NTT DATA personnel. In one of the first joint projects, Dennemeyer, a leading full-service global provider for intellectual property (IP) management, has chosen Mistral AI and NTT DATA to develop an AI-driven application for advanced patent searches and analyses, bringing the technical layers to securely run AI workloads. In another early effort, NTT DATA Luxembourg and Mistral AI will co-develop a sovereign platform in Luxembourg for clients in the regulated financial services and insurance industries.