AI Forum New Zealand’s Post

12 teams. 5 UN Sustainable Development Goals. 1 mission: AI for Good. 💡✨ Day 2 of the Aotearoa AI Hackathon Festival at AUT City Campus is officially in full swing! After an intense night of strategy and team building, our 12 teams have moved from rough concepts into crunch time, translating complex AI tools into practical, high-impact prototypes. Whiteboards are covered, code is being stress-tested, and pitch decks are coming together line by line. From digital accessibility and workforce upskilling to health tech and environmental kaitiakitanga, the energy in the room is incredible. A massive thank you to our volunteers, mentors, Auckland University of Technology, AI Forum New Zealand, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, and the wider tech community for guiding our teams as they refine, pivot, and prep for the stage. The countdown is on! 5-minute pitches land this afternoon, with one winning team advancing to the national stage at the Aotearoa AI Summit in Wellington!

The Aotearoa AI Hackathon Festival is back for 2026 and just one week to go! This year I get to mentor/ judge at THREE events across Auckland. Buzzing doesn't cover it. 📍5th - 6th August - MISSION READY Massive thanks to Diana Sharma and the Mission Ready team for inviting me back for their second AI for Good Hackathon. Last year blew me away, and this year they've got candidates and students joining from right across Aotearoa and Australia. Can't wait to see what this cohort builds. 📍 6th-8th August - Unitec + Seen Ventures + IoT Forum New Zealand This one I'm wearing my IoT Forum NZ co-chair hat, alongside Masoud Shakiba (Unitec, IoT Forum NZ executive council member) and Husain Al-Badry 🇵🇸, Midu Chandra (Seen Ventures). There's something special about watching AI and IoT collide in a hackathon room - always a few ideas that make you go wow! 📍 8th-9th August - academyEX Rounding out the week with the academyEX crew - thanks to Niqui Taylor for the invite. From the curious minds I've interacted with academyEX recently, I'm excited about this event too! Fantastic to see AI Forum New Zealand running this as a nationwide festival - venues right across Aotearoa building solutions under the People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership themes, with local winners feeding into the Aotearoa AI Summit in Wellington in September. Massive kudos to Madeline Newman and team for all their efforts in what's becoming the go to national Hackathon event across Aotearoa New Zealand. IoT Forum New Zealand is proud to support events like these, and it all connects nicely to what I've been writing about through Synaptec (NZ) Ltd. on Physical AI and the Sense- Reason - Act loops moving off the page and into real builds over 48 hours is about as tangible as AIoT gets. 🚀 Three events, one theme: backing the next generation of AI builders solving real problems for real people. If you're competing, mentoring, or judging at any of these - see you there. Tech New Zealand #AIHackathon #AIforGood #ArtificialIntelligence #TechNZ #IoT #Mentoring

Amazing to have Otago in the mix again this year - whether you are an absolute AI beginner or an experienced coder or data scientist, this is the perfect place to try something new - and maybe create something that helps save the planet at the same time? Tā Ian Taylor Daniel Healy Grant Dick University of Otago Business South Dunedin City Council Otago Regional Council

AI can change lives if we build it for everyone. 💙 The AIDA 2.0 Impact Challenge 2026 is officially here! Organized by Prateek Innovations, this initiative brings together tech, innovation, and research to solve real-world accessibility challenges for people with disabilities. Looking back at the incredible ideas, prototypes, and winners from AIDA 2025, we know that true innovation happens when vision meets purpose. Now, it’s time to take that impact even further in 2026. Challenge Tracks: Hackathon: Build rapid, accessible AI solutions. Innovation: Scale high-impact prototypes into real tools. Research: Push the boundaries of assistive technologies. Ready to build technology that matters? 🚀 #aiforgood #hackathon #innovation #aida

JOIN US FOR TECHBBQ WEEK! For the past few months, we've been working with some incredible partners to build something different. So proud and exciiiited about what's coming up: We're bringing together industry leaders, AI founders, investors, and the global AI ecosystem to solve real industrial challenges, and then celebrate together during TECHBBQ week. Here's what's coming: 🔥 Aug 25 – Industrial AI Hackathon (Malmö) Real challenges from leading Nordic industry. Build with top AI talent. Meet the companies that are actually deploying AI. With Howard Wright as our special Silicon Valley guest. Nebius Lovable Neo4j NVIDIA Dell Technologies 🌇 Aug 26 – Nordic Cafe Compute: TECHBBQ After Party Once TECHBBQ winds down, we gather on a rooftop in Copenhagen, for a curated mix of Nordic founders, investors, and Silicon Valley friends, and a short but crisp panel on the real change makers, shaping what's next betting on the next big shift. Nordic Innovation Nordic AI & Quantum Node Cerebras Google 🏆 Aug 27 – Hackathon Winners Celebration The winning teams take the stage at TECHBBQ, followed by an amazing exclusive celebration of the hackathon winners! Nebius Dell Technologies Microsoft 👇Limited spots. Apply using the links in the comments:

What a difference a year makes! Last year, Suede Sadler was part of Empathy, the winning team at the AI Forum New Zealand AI Hackathon at Auckland University of Technology South Campus. Their idea focused on using AI to help identify learning challenges for tamariki aged 5-8. Following the hackathon, the team continued developing their idea, carrying out research and connecting with schools around potential pilot opportunities. They also spent time at Tū Ātea, using our space as they prepared to present Empathy at the 2025 Aotearoa AI Summit. Fast forward a year and Suede and fellow participant, CJ/Colin Murphy, are back at AUT South Campus for the Aotearoa AI Hackathon Festival 2026, but this time they’ve been invited back as judges. This year, Tū Ātea was part of delivering Atamai Iahiko - Te Ara Matihiko | Digital Futures, bringing people together to create AI solutions that matter, grounded in mātauranga Māori and Indigenous approaches. It’s awesome to see that journey come full circle, from developing an idea and taking out the win, to returning a year later to help encourage the next wave of innovators.

AI doesn’t become real infrastructure inside a slide deck. It becomes real when builders ship. The AI Infra Summit Hackathon is bringing developers, startups, researchers, and infrastructure leaders together to build production-grade AI applications on the modern AI stack. 🌎 Online build: September 10–16 📍 On-site in Santa Clara: September 15–17 👥 Teams of 1–5 💻 Open to every experience level 🏆 $10,500 in confirmed prizes—with more partner prizes being finalized Build AI agents, developer tools, voice experiences, data systems, physical AI applications, and infrastructure-enabled products alongside technologies from Intel, Qualcomm, SiMa.ai, and Speechmatics. Online participation is global and open. On-site participation is invitation-only. Your idea deserves infrastructure strong enough to become a real product. Register: https://lnkd.in/dSET7mVC #AIInfrastructure #AIHackathon #BuildWithAI #PhysicalAI

New week, new hackathons. Eight+ London hackathons still to come between now and mid-September surfaced by the automated scan I run across Luma, Eventbrite and more. This is the busiest single week I've tracked all year: six+ hackathons across the last weekend of August alone. 🤖 UK AI Agent Lab: Gemini & Gemma - 22 Aug, Imperial College London. Build agentic workflows with the Google DeepMind team, in the room. 🎬 {{Tech: Europe}} × VEED : Summer Lock-In — 22 Aug. Full-day AI build capped at 80, with OpenAI, fal and Tavily. 🏛️ Council Data Hack Day : 22 Aug, Newspeak House. Build civic tools on a new UK-wide council-minutes dataset. 🏦 Cantor8 London Hackathon : 29 Aug. Build institutional finance on the Canton Network. 🏠 House London #1 : Data Hackathon - 29 Aug, Newspeak House/ Jamie Coombes. Tell the most evidenced story you can with London's housing data. 🔧 Hardware Hack Day - 30 Aug, hosted by Granola. Everyone gets an ESP32-S3 board build something insane. 📣 Translating AI Safety: Content × Comms - 30 Aug, LIaiSE (LI(ai)SE - London Interface for AI Safety) × ElevenLabs. No coding - turn complex safety concepts into briefings, explainers and videos that land. 🏥 Health × AI Hackathon - 18 Sep, Google HQ. £13k in prizes on Google MedGemma, backed by Bupa, AlbionVC, ADELINE and HSBC. What stands out this week is the range. A DeepMind agents lab, civic-tech on public data, onchain finance, hardware, an AI-safety comms sprint, and a healthtech flagship - all in London, all within a month. The scene isn't just growing, it's specializing into every corner of the field. Something for nearly everyone here, including two (Council Data, AI Safety) that need no coding at all, if you've been waiting for a way in. Most are approval-based, so if any catch your eye, apply now, not later. All listed on Hackathon Hub (David Smith), bringing Europe's hackathon ecosystem into one place. Spot one I've missed? Send it my way. #Hackathon #AI #London #MachineLearning #HackathonHub #UK🚀

The next generation of founders is right here in Europe. They're emerging from universities, research labs, Big Tech and startup communities. AI is shortening the path from idea to product, enabling founders to move faster than ever before. To bring these builders together, we're launching AI Innovate: a new event series designed to discover, connect and support Europe's next generation of founders. Across five cities, AI Innovate combines Future Founders Hackathons, off-the-record discussions with leading AI founders, and opportunities to connect with investors, researchers and the wider ecosystem. The series begins in Stockholm on 16 September, with Amsterdam, London, Paris and Berlin to follow. Applications are now open for our Stockholm hackathon with our friends at Lovable, Polar and KTH AI Society here: https://lnkd.in/dMzzDxx2. For our off-the-record fireside chat with Lovable’s Fabian Hedin and Accel’s Zhenya Loginov, sign up here: https://luma.com/xl8t75i0.

Accel just launched AI Innovate A five city series across Europe to find and back the next wave of AI founders coming out of universities, research labs and Big Tech. And we couldn't be prouder to be a part of it. Five cities, five different "Future Founders" challenges, so no two events look the same. First stop: Stockholm, 16 September. Teams have one day to go from zero to first customer. Real signups, or bonus points for actual money on the table by the end of the day, alongside Lovable, Polar and KTH AI Society. $4,000 cash prize, plus mentorship from the Accel team. Applications are now open! Link in the post above 👇