Harnessing Gen AI for India: Hackathon Showcase

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a plethora of Generative AI applications emerge across various fields; predominantly focusing on business use cases such as sales & marketing, coding, etc., or for infotainment through art, comic generation, and more. While it is apparent that this technology’s potential spans the globe, there is a lack of attention to applications specific to India.

With its diverse cultural landscape, vibrant economy, and unique challenges, India presents a huge opportunity for builders to solve interesting problems by leveraging Generative AI. Therefore, to encourage the exploration of applications in the Indian context, we organised the GenAI Hackathon alongside Entrepreneur First with the theme ‘AI for India’. The 24-hour hackathon took place at the Whatfix headquarters in Bangalore on 10th & 11th of June. A prize pool of INR 3 lakhs, along with additional bounties from our partners AWS and LlamaIndex added extra excitement and incentives for the participants.

The hackathon received an overwhelming response, with an impressive registration count of over 220 teams of more than 500 participants from across Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad. From this remarkable pool, we invited a shortlist of 65 high calibre teams to participate in the hackathon. The participant profiles spanned across dimensions, showcasing a wide range of expertise and experience.

We witnessed the enthusiasm of the youngest participants, still in their first year of college, eager to make their mark in AI. Simultaneously, we were honoured to welcome seasoned professionals with over a decade of experience in the tech industry. To add to this diversity, we had participants from across varied academic backgrounds – engineers, doctors, lawyers, product managers, consultants, VCs – coming together to collaborate and exchange ideas. While some had won hackathons in the past, others were inspired to meet like-minded individuals and dabble into the world of AI. It was an extraordinary experience to see this diverse group of individuals pushing boundaries and harnessing the possibilities of AI.

We kicked off the hackathon with an informative session with founders building cutting-edge solutions with AI. Soumyadeep from Dashtoon, Mansoor from Beatoven AI and Arvind from Neuropixel AI shared their journey of building an AI-focused company, insights on building MOATs with engineering and distribution rather than relying on AI itself as well as implications of AI on the larger society. Jerry Liu, founder & CEO of LlamaIndex, joined us virtually to take us through the power of the library in taking LLM into production. We were also joined by Dr Pratik Desai, creator of KissanGPT, who shared his perspectives on building India-specific software tools.

Throughout the hackathon, our participants were encouraged and guided by our mentors – Vibhor Saran, Harsh Agarwal, Arnaud Schenk, Kushagra Pandya, Amogh Vaishampayan, Rachit Agrawal, and Raghav Goyal. Each of the mentors brought a unique experience of leveraging Generative AI across text, video, image, and voice, along with deep technical expertise, thus enabling our participants to refine their thought process and create sharper solutions. The projects were judged by seasoned professionals – Aayush Lalit Jain, Lavanya Tekumalla, Mohan Gupta, Ravindra Yadav, Ravi Theja Desetty, Sayantan Sarkar, Shubha Shedthikere and Vaibhav Bhargava.

After an exhilarating 24 hours of non-stop hacking, we received 50 incredible projects covering a wide range of use cases, each with its own unique and innovative approach. Let’s explore some of these projects, segmented below into different topics, along with brief introduction, challenge faced and link for product demo:

Solutions enabling farmers

A-gr-I – AI driven community for Farmers

Challenge: Designing a friendly product for farmers.

View the product demo here

GrowWise – Helping Indian farmers make better decisions using satellite imagery based insights

Challenge: Understanding the farm parameters to provide to a Generative AI model

Health & Emergency focused solutions

Dengue Support Agent – An agent serving as a telemedicine support for dengue while following the SOP of treatment and collecting various user data.

Challenge: Capturing the flow of an SOP and the information, without making it like a dumb form or IVR. Additionally, prevention of over talk and hallucination of LLMs was a difficult problem to solve.