Inside our first Hackathon in Bengaluru

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from leading community programs, it’s that the most exciting moments usually happen when you give brilliant people a tough problem, hand them the right tools, and get out of their way.

That was our approach for at our first-ever in-person Pathfinder Hackathon in Bengaluru. Good news: our community delivered!

Over two intense days on July 4 and July 5, developers, architects, and automation engineers came together to move past sandbox experiments and build enterprise-grade agentic solutions using the Automation Anywhere platform.

Testing an AI agent in a controlled sandbox is easy but building one that handles real operational chaos, like supply chain surprises, event layout shifts, or sophisticated hiring fraud is an entirely different challenge.
 

The Hackathon challenges
 

While participants knew they’d be building working agentic solutions, we kept the exact problem statements hidden until the kick-off on Day 1. We revealed these three real-world operational challenges:

• Akshaya Patra production order processing: Akshaya Patra feeds millions of children every day. The challenge was building an agentic process to read daily planning reports, reason across inventory levels and supplier reliability, and figure out what should actually be produced each day without accidentally deprioritizing a nutritionally critical program.
• Devatron conference event management: Giving community event organizers the operational backbone of an experienced internal team by managing vendor lead times, tracking live budget commitments, and navigating the domino effect when an event concept changes weeks before the show. This one was my personal favourite due to obvious reasons.
• HireLoop candidate fraud detection: Tackling the very real issue of AI-assisted hiring fraud. Teams had to build an agentic process to track candidate integrity across the full hiring journey, synthesizing subtle signals across resumes, video interviews, and reference checks to catch bad actors before onboarding.

We provided every team with full access to our Enterprise Control Room: Goal-Based Agent Builder, Mozart Orchestrator, Cloud Services, Custom Package SDK, and Document Automation. We also gave them two Claude Pro subscriptions per team. Max Cassidy and Arjun Meda from our team led an optional platform crash course to help everyone get their bearings.

From there, we got out of the way and let teams dive in. Mentors from our engineering team spent the day floating between tables, answering tough architecture questions, and helping teams figure out where the agentic reasoning layer actually belonged.
 

On Day 2, teams finished their builds, prepped for pitching and gave live demos. As we approached the afternoon, I could barely contain my excitement about the presentations, especially because this was my first time judging.

Teams took the stage to demo their agentic automations to each other and our judging panel led by Micah Smith, Arjun Meda, Max Cassidy, Souvik Das, Vineet Pujari and myself. We were thoroughly impressed by what teams were able to accomplish in just two days... it made deliberations and decisions much more difficult! After some debate with the other judges, we named our winners.
 

Celebrating top innovators
 

Every single person who stayed through Day 2 and demoed a working build walked away a winner in my book. But a huge congratulations goes to the teams who took home top honors:

• 🥇 First Place ($1,000 Grand Prize): Team AI Anveshana — Ganesh Bhat (Novatio Solutions), Goutam Bhat (Hitachi Digital Services), and Navya Gunasekaran (Hitachi Energy). Team AI Anveshana won Automation Anywhere's Pathfinder Hackathon by building an autonomous agent for Akshaya Patra that tracks student counts, weather, and nutrition norms, then places live phone calls to schools missing attendance data, ensuring accurate, timely meals for students in need.

• 🥈 Second Place: Team CAH — Abhishek Sharma, Nithish Maiya V, Brunda R Patel, and Subhankar Mondal (Cardinal Health). They built an AI-driven HR fraud detection system using Automation Anywhere's agentic AI capabilities. It screens resumes against job descriptions and uses Gemini-powered checks to detect deepfakes or impersonation during interviews, achieving 100% accuracy across their test samples.

• 🥉 Third Place: Team Neoflo — Shaik Mohd Huzaifa (neoflo.ai). When a new event organizer takes over a recurring event, they inherit the data but not the institutional knowledge or experience of previous organizers. Team Neoflow built an agentic event management platform designed to address this particular challenge.

• 🎤 Best Pitch: Team Tangentia — Inacio Fernandes and Renuka Naik (Tangentia). They developed a five-stage pipeline that continuously monitors candidate risk from application to onboarding. By integrating separate HR processes into a real-time profile, their HR fraud detection and verification solution provides transparent decisions and identifies fraud early, preventing unnecessary interviews.

• 🕵 Hacker’s Choice: Team AnAutoDev — Anand Kale, Lohith B Y, Shantanu Gilbile, and Sonu Vishwakarma (Xalta). They built an intelligent, three-agent system that maintains a continuous integrity thread across the hiring journey. By combining automated resume verification, real-time video deepfake analysis, and post-hire delivery checks, their solution catches AI-assisted fraud and prevents impostors from securing credentials and access.

See how they built it: Join us for our next Dev Meetup on August 27
 

Building agentic process automation requires a mental shift from rigid, step-by-step scripts to continuous reasoning. What our community built in these two days proved how fast developers can adopt this new mindset when given the space to experiment. Building with AI will always remain a team sport, and I can't wait to see what this community builds next. Watch the hackathon recap on Pathfinder LinkedIn.

If you want to look under the hood of these winning architectures, mark your calendar for August 27. We’re hosting a Pathfinder Hackathon winner showcase where our five winning teams will share exactly how they designed and built their agentic solutions in a single weekend. They’ll walk through their end-to-end approach from breaking down the initial problem statement to creating a working agentic workflow. Sign up here.