Takeaways from Elastic’s Forge the Future Hackathon 2026 in Singapore

In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), a year is a long time. At around this time last year, we were exploring the capabilities of generative AI for businesses. Now, we’ve moved on to discussing AI agents. These agentic tools are no longer just about retrieving information and answers; they can distill insights to recommend a course of action.

It’s fitting that the stakes for Elastic’s Forge the Future Hackathon in Singapore keep rising, and the solutions keep getting better. In partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), this year’s edition of the hackathon included 21 teams, totaling 77 participants from universities and businesses that built solutions with AI agents in four hours to compete in the final held at Elastic{ON} Singapore 2026.

Assisted by a team of Elastic solutions architects, three teams would eventually emerge as finalists. These teams were:

• The Upside Devs: A team of students from various faculties at Nanyang Technological University who developed PredictIQ. This solution uses agentic AI to support preventative maintenance across industries, such as aviation and energy. 

• The Ops Forge: A team of students from Singapore Management University that developed ElasticLens, which assists in identifying the story behind every resume during hiring processes.

• Buckle Up 4 AI: A team from Standard Chartered Bank that developed ElasticClaw, delivering explainable decisions at scale.

In March 2026, these teams presented their solutions to a panel of AI visionaries, including Ken Exner, chief product officer at Elastic; Desmond Loh, group director at Centre for Strategic InfoComm Technologies (CSIT); Laurence Liew, director, AI innovation at AI Singapore; and Lim Wei Wah, partner solutions architect lead, ASEAN at AWS. 

Check out the highlights of the hackathon in this video!

Eventually, The Upside Devs emerged victorious with PredictIQ. PredictIQ uses agentic AI to identify when equipment requires maintenance and provide engineers with a knowledge base to help them maintain it, ensuring maximum uptime for business operations.

“We were in our dorms and wanted to participate in a hackathon to try our hand and build something, and Elastic stood out to us with its agentic AI capabilities,” says Akshat Jain, representing The Upside Devs. “We’re not all developers or coders — two members of the team are from computer science, one is from electrical and electronic engineering, and I’m from aerospace engineering. The idea for PredictIQ came from our experiences at internships, and its goal is to provide engineers with all the materials and insights to execute maintenance processes to minimize business disruption.”

Here’s a quick podcast interview with Akshat where he discusses The Upside Devs’ winning solution in greater detail.

In the first few months of 2026, Singapore’s government has already displayed its commitment to accelerating the adoption of agentic AI with the world’s first agentic AI governance framework developed by the Ministry of Digital Development and Information in February. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced a slew of AI initiatives to be rolled out to upskill and enable Singapore workers with AI.

“In Singapore, the government has promoted lifelong learning,” according to Liew, a judge in the hackathon finals. “Continuous learning is key, and we can’t assume that what we’ve learned about a tool three weeks ago is enough. Once a new feature is released for that tool, you’ll have to pick up the skills to utilize it.”

And there’s no better way to learn and relearn AI skills than attending courses and trying your hand at building in a hackathon. Forge the Future is Elastic’s commitment to that principle, giving students and professionals alike the tools, mentorship, platform, and experience to build what’s next. 

Find out more about agentic AI and how Elastic works as a critical layer of context to enable agentic AI use cases by catching up with videos on demand from Elastic{ON} Singapore 2026.

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