How we source Innovation Challenge hackathon use cases

At Microsoft, our leaders use the annual Microsoft Global Hackathon to highlight priorities and focus our employees’ creative energy to solve those business and societal problems. We call these “Executive Challenges” and when a team puts forward a great project it can be the start of something big. For the community facing Innovation Challenge hackathons, we take a similar approach by soliciting real world AI use cases from Azure customers looking to explore new ideas. Our customers get exposure to new talent as well as proof of concept (POC) applications to accelerate their AI journeys. The participants get the chance to demonstrate highly in demand skills while building new capabilities for themselves and our ecosystem.

The purpose of the Innovation Challenge is to bring together developers from groups who are underrepresented in technology. We’re proud to be supporting these organizations who help prepare the participants: BITE-CON, Código Facilito, DIO, GenSpark, Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA), TechBridge, and Women in Cloud. Recent challenges have looked to solve for important scenarios including observability for AI systems, role-based content filtering for AI outputs, VoiceRAG, and accessibility. Check out the winners from our December hackathon here.

In order to qualify for the hackathon, participants need to  earn a Microsoft Applied Skills credential or one of these Azure certifications:  Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Developer Associate, Azure Data Science Associate. During the hackathon, from March 10 – 21, 2025, participants work in teams. For everyone who participates, our goal is to help them open up doors to new career opportunities by demonstrating highly in demand skills and their experience developing AI solutions in real world situations.

Projects are judged by Microsoft subject matter experts, and the best entries will be awarded prizes to be divided equally among the teams.

• One $10,000 top prize
• Two $5,000 second place prizes
• Three $2,500 third place prizes

Judging is based on the following criteria and weighting

• Performance 25%
• Innovation 25%
• Breadth of Azure services used 25%
• Responsible AI 25%

Hackathons are a key way to bring the Azure community together to build new capabilities for both individual developers as well as our industry as a whole. We’re excited to see what this new group of Azure developers will build!