India’s top AI teams set to battle in Elastic and AWS's Forge the Future Hackathon finale

An AI agent that hallucinates, misses a threat, or makes the wrong call is not intelligent. It is a liability. That is the challenge at the heart of the Forge the Future Hackathon, which has brought together India's top AI developers to build autonomous, explainable agents capable of solving real enterprise problems across search, observability, and security.

Organized by Elastic, powered by AWS and in partnership with Nasscom, Sarvam AI, and HackCulture, the hackathon aims to push teams beyond demos and promises. Agents are being tested on measurable performance, reliability, and real-world impact, with the goal of building something worthy of the Elastic{ON} Mumbai stage and ready for production use. After registration, team formation, and idea submission, the shortlisted teams are now headed to the Grand Finale.

What the teams have been building

Forge the Future is structured around four challenge tracks, each judged on evidence rather than pitches.

Track One:

Intelligent search and AI platform called on teams to build AI experiences that know where to look and how to reason, from hybrid search engines benchmarked against pure vector databases, to RAG agents for BFSI document intelligence, to multi-step Agent Builder workflows that triage support tickets.

Track Two:

Observability and autonomous operations focused on turning signals into insights and incidents into action, including comparing ES|QL query performance against LogQL and PromQL, and building agents that detect anomalies, correlate traces, and suggest remediation.

Track Three:

Security and AI-powered Security Operations Centres (SOC) challenged teams to reimagine security operations for the AI era, with problems spanning AI SOC workflows, BFSI fraud detection, CERT-In compliance agents, and threat hunting at scale using ES|QL.

Track Four:

Industry solutions and vertical experiences asked builders to create solutions for BFSI risk management, ecommerce and retail intelligence, or healthcare and insurance intelligence, each grounded in real data and built for explainability and auditability.

Every team has been working on the Elasticsearch Platform, running on AWS cloud infrastructure, the same stack on which their solutions will be built and judged.

The road to the Grand Finale

Registration and team formation ran from July 18 to August 21, with idea submissions accepted over the same window. Shortlisted teams, announced on August 26, will now advance to an in-person Grand Finale in Bengaluru to be held on September 18-19.

Over these two days, the teams will build, refine, and present their solutions alongside Elastic and AWS experts, turning weeks of preparation into a live demo in front of technology leaders.

The total prize pool stands at Rs 6,00,000. The first-place team will take home Rs 3,00,000 along with Rs 75,000 in Sarvam credits, the second-place team will receive Rs 2,00,000 and Rs 50,000 in Sarvam credits, and the third-place team will be awarded Rs 1,50,000 and Rs 25,000 in Sarvam credits.

Beyond the prize money, the top three teams will get a bigger platform: a chance to showcase their solutions to technology leaders, industry experts, and the wider Elastic community.

The partners behind the challenge

Elastic, is the organizer and technology partner. It is bringing its expertise in search, observability, security, and generative AI to the competition. AWS serves as the cloud partner, providing the secure and scalable infrastructure on which every solution has been built and judged.

Nasscom AI, the voice of India's AI ecosystem, is the industry partner driving trustworthy AI adoption, while Sarvam AI, an Indian company building multilingual foundation models, is the AI partner. HackCulture, a global innovation platform, is the innovation partner running the program end-to-end.

A bigger stage awaits at Elastic{ON} Mumbai

The Forge the Future Hackathon does not end with the Grand Finale in Bengaluru. Just under two weeks later, on September 30, Elastic will host Elastic{ON} Mumbai at the JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar, as part of the global Elastic{ON} Tour 2026/2027. Built around the theme ‘Forge the Future,’ the one-day event will bring together developers, SREs, IT leaders, and security professionals to explore how enterprise data can power agentic AI across search, observability, and security.

The top three teams from Forge the Future Bengaluru hackathon will carry their winning solutions to Mumbai, presenting them to the wider Elastic community, technology leaders, and industry experts at Elastic{ON}.

For these developers, the Grand Finale is not just the end of the competition. It is a direct path to a stage where their work on production-ready AI agents will be seen by the people building the future of enterprise AI in India.