AI Solution Makers.
The Event Tracks Schedule Who Gets In Judges & Speakers Speak 2025 Apply
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Virtual / Worldwide 2nd Edition Applications Open

AI Solution Makers Hackathon

72 hours to build one thing and show that it works. Everybody competes from home. We read every application by hand and we turn most of them down.

DatesSeptember 28-30, 2026
FormatFully virtual
TeamsSolo or up to 4
ApplicationsRolling, until full
Apply to build Apply to judge Apply to mentor Apply to speak
01

What this is

A demo only its author can drive isn't a solution. That is the whole premise. You get 3 days, a single problem you actually care about, and an audience on Wednesday afternoon that will ask what your thing does when the input is garbage.

All of it runs online. No venue, no flights. You work at your own desk on your own hours, with a team you bring or a team we put you in on Monday morning.

The group stays small on purpose. Judging 40 demos carefully takes longer than judging 400 badly, and we would rather do the first one.

You get mentors who have run this kind of system in production. You get judges who ask the question you were quietly hoping nobody would ask. And you get 3 days without meetings, which for most of us is the rarer prize.

Build something that survives contact with a user.

02

5 tracks

Pick one when you apply. Switch on Monday if your team drags you somewhere better.

01

Agents & Automation

Software that takes several steps on somebody's behalf and knows when to stop. What we care about is what yours does on the step that fails.

02

AI-Native Interfaces

The part a person touches. A chat box bolted to the corner of an existing product is the low bar. Clear it.

03

Retrieval & Knowledge

Getting the right context in front of the model. Search, ranking, memory, structured sources, whatever it takes to keep the answer honest.

04

Evaluation & Reliability

How you know it works. Then how you find out it stopped working, before a user has to tell you.

05

Data Plumbing

The layer everything else sits on. Extra credit for a pipeline that stays upright when somebody changes the input format at 2am and mentions it to nobody.

03

3 days

Anchor sessions get recorded so nobody loses a day to a timezone. Between them you build.

01

Monday, Sept 28

Briefs and teams

  • Opening talk, 20 minutes
  • Kickoff and the problem briefs
  • Team formation for solo applicants
  • Track choice locks at end of day
  • First build block
02

Tuesday, Sept 29

Build and break

  • Opening talk, 20 minutes
  • Mentor office hours, rolling
  • Midpoint check-in with a judge
  • Teams test each other's builds
  • Late block for the stubborn bugs
03

Wednesday, Sept 30

Ship and show

  • Opening talk, 20 minutes
  • Submissions close at midday
  • Demos, 5 minutes each
  • Judge questions, on the record
  • Results, then everyone sleeps
04

Who gets in

This one isn't open to everybody. We don't count years and we have no opinion about your title. We do want to see a thing you built that somebody other than you has used.

A side project with 12 real users counts. So does a research prototype that somebody else has run without you sitting next to them. A repository with a beautiful README and nothing behind it does not.

Send the work first. We'll read that before we read anything else about you.

People who tend to do well here
  • Engineers who have shipped a thing and then had to keep it alive
  • Data and ML people with work you can point at
  • Technical founders building on models right now
  • Designers and PMs who write code and have the receipts
  • Students and career-switchers with a real project behind them
The 2025 edition
05

We ran this last October. It's back.

The first AI Solution Makers Hackathon ran on October 9 and 10, 2025. 2 days. Fully remote. Put together fast, mostly to find out whether the format held up at all.

It held. People turned up with a problem on Thursday morning and left on Friday evening with something running, and the demos that afternoon were sharper than what we've sat through at conferences 10 times the size.

The same complaint came back from almost everybody: 2 days was not enough. Nobody wanted more programming or more panels. They wanted more hours at the keyboard.

So the 2026 edition adds a third day and a judging panel we recruited months in advance rather than the week before. The rest stays as it was. Small group, remote, no filler, real deadline.

2 days becomes 3
The extra day goes to building. We didn't add any ceremony to fill it.
Mentors and judges, lined up early
Office hours now cover more than one waking timezone, and every judge is briefed before Monday.
06

Judge or mentor

Judges are the reason the demos are worth watching. We want people who have built this kind of system themselves and can tell a good demo from a good system inside of 90 seconds.

The commitment comes to a few hours. 1 briefing call in advance, a midpoint check-in with a couple of teams, then demos on Wednesday. All remote, and you pick the tracks you're closest to.

Mentors do the less visible half of it. You hold office hours, somebody shares a screen with a stack trace on it, and you save that team half a day. 2 hours is a useful shift. Take the slots that fit around your actual week, on the subjects you know cold.

We are selective about mentors for the same reason we are selective about builders. A team gets a couple of hours of your attention and then goes and acts on what you told them, so bad advice costs them a day they don't have. We would rather run a short bench of people who have done the work than a long list of names.

If you've debugged this at 1am, somebody here wants to talk to you.

See judges and speakers
What we score on
  • Does it work when a stranger uses it
  • Was the problem worth the 3 days
  • Engineering judgment: what they built and what they skipped
  • How the team handles the questions afterwards
Speakers wanted 3 slots 1 per day
07

Speak

Each of the 3 days opens with 1 short talk. 20 minutes, live, on something you have built or broken yourself. Anybody can put their name in.

There is no stage and no keynote energy. What you get is a room of people who are mid-build and will come straight at you with questions when you finish. The talks that land are specific: a system you shipped and what it cost, a decision you would take back, a failure mode nobody warned you about.

We pick these the same way we pick judges and mentors, which is to say carefully. A talk takes 20 minutes from every person at the event, so we would rather run 3 good ones than fill a schedule.

Pitch us
  • A title and a paragraph on what you'd cover
  • What you built that makes it your talk to give
  • Which day suits you
Apply to speak
08

Meet your speakers

Confirmed so far. We announce the rest as they lock in.

SpeakerDay 1

Venkat Gudise

Data Engineering and Analytics Executive

Accomplished Data Engineer; Analytics Executive with over 20 years of leadership experience in Planning, designing, building, and optimizing large-scale cloud platforms and business intelligence solutions.

Venkat introduces himself / 40 seconds

SpeakerAlso judging

Joby Neelamthara Thoman

Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft

JOBY INTRODUCES HIMSELF

SpeakerAlso judging

Chandrasekaran Rajendran

Data/AI Architect at Intuit

Data/AI Architect at Intuit with over 10+ years of continuous technical leadership and 17+ years of end-to-end software engineering experience across Big Data, Cloud architecture, and GenAI platforms.

CHANDRASEKARAN INTRODUCES HIMSELF

SpeakerAlso judging

Ridhdhi Desai

Software Engineering Manager at Apple

RIDHDHI INTRODUCES HERSELF

SpeakerAlso judging

Raja Ponnuchamy Lakshmanan

Reliability Engineering Leader at The Hartford

RAJA INTRODUCES HIMSELF

SpeakerAlso judging

Nireesha Mandala

Engineering Manager, enterprise AI SaaS

Engineering manager at a leading AI-based SaaS company with 14+ years in enterprise platform engineering and AI-driven development. Stanford AI-Driven Leadership Program graduate. Builds scalable systems and the teams behind them.

NIREESHA INTRODUCES HERSELF

See judges and speakers Apply to speak
09

Apply

The same address, whichever way you want in. Write to us. Every email gets read and every email gets an answer, including the nos.

For builders

Apply to build

Bring a team or come alone and we'll place you on Monday morning.

Include
  • Your name and where you're based
  • What you've built. A link beats a paragraph
  • The track you're drawn to
  • Teammates, if you have them
Email your application
For judges

Apply to judge

A few hours across the 3 days, remote, on the tracks you know best.

Include
  • A short bio or a profile link
  • What you've built or run in production
  • Tracks you'd want to judge
  • Your timezone
Email to judge
For mentors

Apply to mentor

Office hours in whatever slots suit you. The bench is short and we read these applications the same way we read the builders'.

Include
  • What you'd be useful on
  • Something you've built or run
  • Rough hours you can cover
  • Your timezone
Email to mentor
For speakers

Apply to speak

20 minutes on the morning of your choice. 3 slots across the event.

Include
  • A title and what you'd cover
  • What you built that backs it up
  • The day that suits you
  • Your timezone
Email to speak

Either way, the address is hello@aisolutionmakers.com

10

Questions

Is it really fully virtual?

Yes. Every session happens online and there is no in-person component at any point. You need a laptop and a connection you trust.

Can I apply without a team?

Plenty of people do. We run team formation on the first morning. You can also compete alone if that suits you better.

Do I have to be awake for 3 days straight?

No, and please don't. Anchor sessions are recorded and mentor hours are spread across timezones. Work the hours your body actually keeps.

Who owns what we build?

You do. Your team keeps the code and everything around it. The only thing we ask is that you demo it publicly on the last day.

Can I start building before September 28?

Turn up with a stack you know and any boilerplate you'd reach for on a normal project. The solution itself gets built during the 3 days.

How long are the talks?

20 minutes, once a day, live at the start of the morning. Slides are optional and a screen share of the actual thing is usually better.

Can anyone mentor?

No. Mentor applications get the same read as builder applications, and we turn plenty of them down. Teams act on what a mentor tells them, so we take on fewer people and pick ones who have shipped the thing they're advising on.

Can I mentor and judge?

Yes. Say so in your email and tell us which one you'd rather do if we have to pick.

When do applications close?

We review as they arrive and stop when the group is full, so earlier is better. Email us and we'll tell you honestly where things stand.

3 days in September

Bring back something that works. September 28-30, 2026, virtual, applications read as they arrive.

Apply to build Apply to judge Apply to mentor Apply to speak