The Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Ministry of Communications, Government of India, in collaboration with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), organized the Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Good Build-a-thon 5.0 on the last day of India Mobile Congress 2026 at Yashobhoomi, New Delhi. This hands-on capacity-building event brought together teams from across the country to develop Agentic AI solutions for the telecommunications sector, themed "Creating innovative agents in 5G".
The event was inaugurated by Dr. Bilel Jamoussi, Deputy Director and Chief of Study Groups and Policy Department at ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, who emphasized the importance of developing Agentic AI solutions that are contextualized to the country, compliant with international standards, and governed by local policies. He stressed that policy gaps must be identified through real AI solutions and then addressed in regulation to fully realize AI benefits.
The build-a-thon began in early July with more than 25 registered teams, each averaging four members. During the preparation phase, ITU and DoT experts conducted five online mentoring sessions covering problem statements, the ITU-T Y.3172 standardized machine learning pipeline, the ITU AI Readiness 2.0 report, and open-source data sources. This resulted in over 10 hours of mentoring that produced 16 well-designed AI prototype submissions featuring various agent types including knowledge-base agents, policy and legal adviser agents, and coordinator agents.
Notable solutions included a multi-agent network analysis system with policy mapping that combines country-specific 5G/telecom knowledge with multi-agent AI analysis, progressive network-error scenarios, and policy gap identification. Another standout solution proposed a unified traffic and security controller that manages traffic priority and security based on service intent, available network resources, and data sensitivity. A third innovative solution embedded regulation directly into network operations with optimizer agents for Spectrum, Energy and Slicing, plus a Regulator agent with veto power checking actions against ten rules grounded in Indian telecom law.
The competition concluded with prize distributions: Team Netaxis from RVCE Bangalore won 1st prize for "Context Aware Agentic Orchestration of QoS and Adaptive Security in Resource Constrained 5G"; Team SNR received 2nd prize for "knowledge-grounded retrieval, deterministic constraint validation and multi-agent arbitration"; and Team Agentnet won 3rd prize for "TeleAgent: Collaborative Multi Agent Framework Using a Fine Tuned Small Language model for Automated Private 5G Network Troubleshooting". Special women's prizes were awarded to Team Orbitflow (SNU Chennai) and Team Handshake protocol for "Predictive Traffic-aware Beam Hopping for LEO Non-Terrestrial Networks" and "Law-aware AI agents for 5G emergency response" respectively, while Team Nethealers received the judges' prize for "Autonomous Self-Healing 5G Radio Access Network Agent with Foundation-Model Diagnosis and Digital-Twin Pre-Validation".