AI for Good Build-a-thon 5.0 Held at India Mobile Congress

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Ministry of Communications, working with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), held the Artificial Intelligence for Good Build-a-thon 5.0 on the closing day of India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2026 at Yashobhoomi, New Delhi. Teams from across the country built Agentic AI solutions for the telecommunications sector, and the theme of the exercise was 'Creating innovative agents in 5G'.

Who opened it

The Build-a-thon was inaugurated by Dr Bilel Jamoussi, Deputy Director and Chief of the Study Groups and Policy Department in the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, with senior DoT officials and representatives of academia, industry, international organisations and the technology ecosystem present. He argued that Agentic AI solutions must be shaped to the country they serve, must meet international standards and must sit within local policy, and that real solutions are what expose the policy gaps a regulator then has to close.

From kick-off to prototypes

The exercise opened in early July with more than 25 registered teams, each averaging four members. During the preparation phase ITU and DoT experts ran five online mentoring sessions on the problem statements, the ITU-T Y.3172 standardised machine learning pipeline, the ITU AI Readiness 2.0 report and open-source data sources. More than ten hours of mentoring produced 16 prototype submissions, featuring knowledge-base agents, policy and legal adviser agents and coordinator agents that orchestrate other agents.

Standout solutions

• A multi-agent network analysis that maps a country-specific telecom knowledge base against policy and standards, identifies gaps and leaves auditable evidence.
• A unified traffic and security controller that works from three inputs: service intent, available network resources and data sensitivity.
• A design that puts law inside the control loop: three optimiser agents for spectrum, energy and slicing propose actions, while a regulator agent with veto power tests each against ten rules grounded in Indian telecom law.

The prizes

The winning entry was titled 'Context Aware Agentic Orchestration of QoS and Adaptive Security in Resource Constrained 5G'. The judging panel drew on DoT and C-DoT, and judges noted the energy of the teams and the live demonstrations that showed error scenarios and policy gaps. DoT described the exercise as evidence of India's potential to lead both in AI solutions for telecommunications and in the policy design that governs them.