Google Cloud Gen AI Exchange Hackathon: The 10 innovations that stood out this year

The second edition of the Gen AI Exchange Hackathon, by Google Cloud in partnership with Hack2skill, has concluded with 10 standout teams emerging as winners across student and professional tracks. After weeks of learning, building, and refining their ideas through the Gen AI Academy and mentorship sprints, these teams presented solutions that demonstrated how generative AI can move from pilot experiments to real-world, scalable impact.

This year, the Gen AI Exchange Program saw over 2.7 lakh developer registrations, resulting in 4,400+ AI prototypes built over the course of the hackathon. From this pool, the top 100 teams were shortlisted to participate in the final offline showcase, joined by 31 industry jury members who evaluated the solutions in person.

The program concluded on November 29 in Bengaluru, where the shortlisted teams presented their solutions before an expert jury. The finalists represented a cross-section of India’s emerging AI talent, from student innovators to industry practitioners experimenting with generative AI inside their domains.

This year’s hackathon was shaped through partnerships with JK Cement, Let’sVenture, EaseMyTrip, NASSCOM, and Maharashtra State Government ensuring that problem statements reflected real industry pain points and societal needs.

Participants were given access to Google Cloud’s AI stack including Gemma, Gemini, Vertex AI, and Gemini Code Assist to build prototypes for challenges spanning mental health, misinformation, industrial optimization, travel planning, and governance.

Here are the 10 winning teams whose solutions stood out for innovation, feasibility, clarity of impact, and potential to scale.

Professional track winners:

1. Team Skippers

Solution: AI for Test Case Automation - Automating test case generation with AI

Skippers built a meta-automation system that generates healthcare software test cases aligned with compliance requirements, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy.

2. Team May The Agents Be With You

Solution: Autonomous cement plant optimization - Optimizing cement operations with Generative AI

Their solution uses agentic AI to autonomously optimize cement plant operations, balancing energy efficiency, product quality, and environmental impact.

3. Team AIxpert

Solution: PitchLense - AI analyst for startup evaluation

PitchLense acts as an AI investment analyst, synthesizing deck materials, founder narratives, and market signals into actionable insights for investors.

4. Team Ghostpye

Solution: TripAI - AI-powered trip planner

TripAI produces personalized itineraries that adapt to budget, time, and interests and completes bookings through EMT’s inventory in one click.

5. Team Success

Solution: GovernAI - AI-powered governance: Transforming citizen service delivery

Success developed a dual-agent governance platform that streamlines citizen service delivery through automation, feedback loops, and intelligent routing.

Student track winners

6. Team Prompt-o-nauts

Solution: YouthMind - Generative AI for youth mental wellness

YouthMind is an AI-powered support platform offering confidential, stigma-free emotional guidance for young people. It blends conversational intelligence with empathetic design to make mental wellness more accessible.

7. Team Oopsie Operators

Solution: ArtisanGully - AI-powered marketplace assistant for local artisans

ArtisanGully is an agentic AI assistant that helps craftsmen showcase their work, tell their stories, and reach customers digitally, bridging the gap between traditional art and modern markets.

8. Team Crewmate

Solution: Legal SahAI - Generative AI for demystifying legal documents

Legal SahAI simplifies complex legal documents into clear, understandable summaries, enabling broader access to legal information for citizens unfamiliar with legal language.

9. Team Technopaths

Solution: Parallax - AI-powered tool for combating misinformation

Parallax uses explainable AI to detect misinformation, classify its severity, and educate users on how to identify credible information in an age of increasing digital noise.

10. Team Error_404_Not_Found

Solution: AI Career & Skills Advisor - Personalized career and skills advisor

This AI solution analyses individual strengths, identifies skill gaps, and recommends personalized career pathways aligned with emerging roles in India’s fast-evolving job market.

A showcase of India’s AI potential

Taken together, the winning solutions offer a snapshot of where India’s AI ecosystem is headed: towards tools that confront everyday realities as much as enterprise-scale problems. Apart from technical ambition, this year’s entries placed an emphasis on usability, context, and deployment.

For a technology still finding its footing in many sectors, these prototypes show how quickly Indian developers are learning to work with generative AI in responsible, grounded ways. The Gen AI Exchange Hackathon is emerging as a useful testing ground for that evolution.