The November Innovation Challenge Winning Teams!

We run the Innovation Challenge program because we believe the only way we can have the best AI platform for every person and every organization is by having a truly diverse and highly skilled community of developers building AI solutions on Azure. We run the Innovation Challenge program because we are geeks who love a good hackathon. We run the Innovation Challenge program because we get blown away by what our community can do.

From our first Innovation Challenge hackathon in June of 2024 to our sixth that just finished in November of 2025, the growth curve is steep! Our judges work with the best development teams in the world, delivering cutting edge AI solutions. But even with our front row view of things, we are amazed by what can be done today when ad hoc teams come together, despite limited resources and tight deadlines. Participants were asked to choose one of these real world use cases.

• Auto-resolve Service Desk: Create a multi agent service desk experience that reduces wait times and backlog while earning trust through safe automation, transparency, and graceful escalation.
• Civic Chat: Build an intelligent civic engagement platform that enables communities to access local government information, participate in discussions, and receive personalized updates using Azure AI services.
• Customer Personalization Orchestrator: Build a team of agents that segments customers, retrieves product content, creates message variants, and executes A/B/n experiments, with safety checks for content and proof of uplift.

This time around there were 76 projects from over 300 participants representing more than a dozen organizations in the program. The winners chosen by the judges came from Código Facilito, DIO, GenSpark, Project Blue Mountain, and Women in Cloud.

First place $10,000

AgroHelpdesk: an intelligent service desk for agribusiness that uses a coordinated set of AI agents

Second place $5,000

CivicUtopia: an intelligent and inclusive civic engagement platform designed to streamline how citizens interact with their local governments and political landscape. 

Multi-Agent Service Desk for Education: Large educational institutions struggle with repetitive service desk requests—password resets, course enrollment inquiries, transcript requests, and more. This solution intelligently resolves routine cases while escalating only the complex ones to human staff.

Third place $2,500

ResolveIQ: an intelligent helpdesk solution that uses autonomous AI agents, advanced orchestration, and Azure cognitive services to revolutionize customer support and internal assistance.

ChainReach AI: multi-agent system that automatically personalizes marketing campaigns at scale

CivicChat (D.C.) : a multilingual, AI-powered civic engagement assistant designed to make government information accessible, trustworthy, and easy to understand

Tune into Microsoft DevRadio over the next couple weeks to meet these teams!