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FORGE THE FUTURE

HACKATHON

Powered by AWS and Hack Days

This isn't a hackathon where you build a chatbot and call it AI. You'll have one day to design, build, and prove your agent is production-ready. Every agent must use certain Elastic features. Beyond that, the build is yours. Pick a track, find a problem worth solving, and show us that your agent can solve a real-life problem.

Date: Friday, 16 October

Time: 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.

Location: Level 8, 2 Market St, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia

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The challenge

An agent that hallucinates, misses a threat, or makes the wrong call isn't intelligent. It's a liability.

Think your AI agent is production-ready? Prove it. Australia's best developers are coming together to build autonomous, explainable agents that solve real enterprise problems across search, observability, and security — powered by Elastic and AWS.

Your agent won't be judged on demos or promises. It will be tested on measurable performance, reliability, and real-world impact. Build something worthy, stable, and ready for production.

  • Exciting prizes to be revealed soon

  • 3 challenge tracks

  • 3–5 people per team

Challenge tracks

Pick your battlefield on one of three tracks. Every track is judged on evidence. See what problems you can take on.

  • Track 1

    Search and AI experiences

    Build an assistant that knows where to look and how to reason over your data.

    • The "what should I watch/read/cook tonight?" agent: Index a dataset you love (movies, recipes, books, games) and build an assistant that handles fuzzy, human requests like "something cozy but not cheesy" and explains 
    • The team knowledge buddy: Point it at your docs, wikis, or FAQs and build an assistant that answers newcomers' questions with sources and admits when it doesn't know instead of making things up.
    • The trip planner that does the digging: The agent searches destinations, weather patterns, and reviews to turn "5 days, small budget, hates crowds" into a reasoned itinerary you can argue with.

  • Track 2

    Autonomous operations

    Build an agent that turns signals into action before a human is paged.

    • The 3:00 a.m. first responder: It spots an anomaly, investigates the related traces and logs on its own, and arrives at the on-call engineer with a diagnosis and proposed fix rather than a raw alert.
    • The SLO guardian: The agent watches error-budget burn and acts early, rerouting traffic, scaling a service, or opening a ticket with the evidence attached before the budget is gone.
    • The deploy watchdog: It compares telemetry before and after every release, decides whether the deploy made things worse, and triggers a rollback workflow if it did.

  • Track 3

    AI-powered security

    Reimagine the SOC: Cut investigation time from hours to minutes.

    • The alert triage analyst: It takes the overnight alert queue, classifies and prioritises it, closes the noise with a written justification, and escalates only what deserves a human.
    • The threat-hunting copilot: It describes a suspicion in plain language and forms hypotheses, queries the data, and walks you through what it found and why it matters.
    • The exposure mapper: The agent reads incoming vulnerability advisories, checks them against what's actually running in your environment, and produces a risk summary with an audit trail.

Your solution must make use of both Elastic Agent Builder and Elastic Workflows.

Use Agent Builder to bring intelligence, reasoning, and natural-language interaction to your solution, and Workflows to orchestrate actions and automate processes.

The examples above are just a starting point. They're here to get you thinking, not to tell you what to build.

Have a completely different idea? Go for it. Solve a problem you've encountered, invent something new, or take an existing idea somewhere unexpected.

Think big. Be creative. Build something useful. Surprise us.

Required Elastic features by track

Each track comes with a curated toolbox of Elastic features. You don't have to use them all, so pick wisely. The best projects use a few features deeply, not every feature shallowly.

  • Track 1

    Search and AI experiences

    • Hybrid search (semantic & lexical) using Linear or RRF retrievers
    • Use of Elastic and/or Jina models for embedding and re-ranking
    • Bonus points for the use of multi-modal search using Jina Models

  • Track 2

    Autonomous operations

    • Streams for AI-driven log management and significant-event surfacing
    • APM and distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry-native
    • ML anomaly detection and log rate/pattern analysis
    • SLOs with burn-rate alerting Observability for investigation context
    • Observability for investigation context

  • Track 3

    AI-powered security

    • Detection rules and behavioral ML jobs
    • Entity analytics and risk scoring
    • Cases with evidence and audit trail

  • Who should attend?

    This event is designed for private and public sector professionals:

    Senior engineers and developers working with AI, search or observability platforms

    • Security and DevOps professionals
    • Technical leads looking to explore production-grade AI agent development

  • Why join?

    This exclusive opportunity will provide access to industry leading experts to improve your technical skills across:

    • Search and AI experiences
    • Autonomous operations
    • AI-powered security

Your Hackathon Journey

Details
Friday, September 25

Pre-Hackathon Idea Generation Workshop (Virtual)

For teams that don't have an idea to submit, don't worry, as we will be running an online workshop to help you generate some options!

POWERED BY

2 platforms behind every agent you build

The Elasticsearch Platform, running on AWS cloud infrastructure, is the stack your solution is built and judged on.

  • Organiser and technology partner

    Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) integrates its deep expertise in search technology with artificial intelligence to help everyone transform all of their data into answers, actions, and outcomes. The Elasticsearch Platform, which is the foundation for its search, observability, and security solutions, is used by thousands of companies, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500.

  • Cloud partner

    AWS provides secure, scalable, and reliable cloud infrastructure that helps organisations innovate faster. From compute and storage to AI, analytics, and machine learning, AWS enables businesses to build modern applications, streamline operations, and accelerate digital transformation.

  • Innovation partner

    Hack Days Australia helps organisations unlock innovation through expertly facilitated hackathon events. We work with your team to design a unique, themed experience that drives collaboration, surfaces real ideas, and delivers tangible outcomes. Every engagement is fully customised and can be managed from planning through delivery.

Judges

  • Elastic

    Cyril Amsellem

    Director, Customer Architecture

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)

    Allanna Rigby

    Principal GTM Specialist – GenAI & AI/ML

Judging criteria

  • 25%

    Innovation

    Novelty of the idea and its use of Generative AI

    We strongly encourage the use of Elastic Agent Builder.

  • 20%

    Impact

    Practical applications and the potential to solve real-world problems

  • 10%

    Presentation

    Clarity of the demo and pitch

  • 30%

    Technical implementation

    Effective use of Elasticsearch and mentioned technology relevance

  • 15%

    User experience

    Simplicity, design, and usability

Frequently asked questions

Who can participate in Forge the Future Sydney Edition?

The hackathon must include 3-5 participants, all of whom must be 18 years or older. Basic knowledge of Elastic products and AWS LLM is recommended. Teams must be made up of no less than two (2) members and no more than five (5) members.

Can individuals register for Hackathon?

Individual registrations are welcome! You can choose to work independently or let us know if you’d like to be grouped with like-minded individuals. Simply register and share your ideas in your submission.

Is there a cost to take part in the hackathon?

No, participation is completely free.

Can we do any pre-preparation before the hackathon?

No, you are only expected to start hacking on the hackathon day. However, data preparation is encouraged.

I already have data an existing Elastic cluster, can I reuse that?

Yes, you can reuse it. We consider this part of data preparation. You will not be at a disadvantage if you don't have an existing one.

I do not have any technical background, can I join the hackathon?

At least one member of your team should have a technical background to be able to create an application using Elastic and Amazon Bedrock (and/or Foundation Models). You may find that a diverse team made of product managers, data specialists, UX practitioners can be beneficial.

What do I have to bring for the hackathon?

You'll need to bring along your own device(s) and accessories like chargers. We'll share a full checklist before the hackathon.

Who owns the IP of the project?

You do, along with the rest of your team!

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