AI for Productivity and Composable AI: Inside the 2026 Celonis India Hackathon

Breaking Down Silos to Drive Strategic Innovation
The event served as a high-velocity incubator designed to unite our local site around two core themes: AI for Productivity and Composable AI. The initiative generated massive momentum, engaging 62 Celonauts across 20 initial teams who broke through functional silos to form cross-departmental squads.

Innovation does not happen in isolation. To foster genuine synergy, the hackathon mandated cross-departmental teams of 3 to 5 members, deliberately breaking down traditional barriers between engineering, product, and go to market teams.

This diversity of thought ensured that the solutions built were holistically designed to solve real, multi-faceted enterprise problems. Through a rigorous selection process, the initial submissions were narrowed down from 10 Semifinal Submissions to 6 Finalists. At the Grand Finale, these teams pitched live working prototypes to an executive panel and a packed audience.

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The Winning Innovations
The final prototypes demonstrated a major leap forward in bringing our core themes to life, focusing heavily on removing customer friction, enabling seamless self-service, and optimizing token usage.

Overall Champions: Serious Vibers – Agentic App Installer
This team set out to make customer onboarding effortless. Their autonomous deployment engine uses agentic workflows to analyze system dependencies and self-correct setup errors as they happen, replacing manual configuration and long setup pipelines. Deployment timelines move from days to minutes.
The Team: Ashwin Kumar S S, Sai Sri Nandan S, Sachin Shejwadkar, Aatish Pandey, Sandeep Behera

Runner-Up: Data Heist - Extraction Errors Copilot
Anyone who has worked on a data pipeline knows the feeling: an ingestion job drops, and the next few days disappear into long support cycles to locate and fix issues. This team built a Copilot that turns backend errors into plain-English explanations paired with automated troubleshooting steps. Resolution cycles go from days to under five minutes, and customers can fix issues on their own instead of waiting in a queue.
The Team: Vaibhavi Tikone, Atal Bhushan, Arpit Mangal, Sagar Madivalar, Shaman Sunil Jaiswal

Audience Choice Award: Game of Tokens - PromptSense Gateway

This squad went after the hidden cost of enterprise AI: token waste from inefficient prompts. Their lightweight middleware sits in front of the LLM gateway, optimising prompts on the way through, preserving code structure, and routing each task to the model best suited for it — cutting unnecessary token cost and compute footprint at the same time.

The Team: Umang Kumar, Gagan Bajpai, Rahul Bhat TR, Deepak Hiremath

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How the Hackathon Embraces Our Core Values and FISA Principles
At Celonis, we live by our core values—including Best Team Wins and We Own It—and execute them through our core operating principles: FISA (Focus, Invent, Simplify, Act). The India Hackathon served as a practical reflection of these guiding frameworks.

Inculcating Collaboration (Best Team Wins): Mandating cross-departmental teams forces a unique operational melting pot. This creates deep cross-functional empathy and breaks down everyday organizational silos. Bringing different backgrounds together ensures our decisions and tools are driven by collective, inclusive teamwork.

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Inventing in an Immersive Learning Playground: The event establishes a safe environment for hands-on Platform Mastery. It gives new hires rapid onboarding into OCPM while providing veterans the creative autonomy to experiment with cutting-edge tools without the fear of failure.

Simplifying Our Workflows: By building tools that automate away our own internal operational friction, we simplify our workflows. When we make our own work effortless, we inherently learn how to eliminate friction for our customers.

Acting with Ownership (We Own It): True to a founder's mentality, this initiative gives rising stars and quiet innovators a high-visibility stage to act and pitch directly to site leadership and global executives.

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Join us

If the kind of work above sounds like the kind of work you'd want to be part of — building real products that solve real enterprise problems, with teammates who'll push you and a platform you can actually shape — we're hiring across different teams at Celonis India.

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Sowmya Kubendran

Sowmya is the VP and Head of Celonis Garage. She heads the innovation hub, working closely with customers, partners to co-innovate breakthrough solutions at the intersection of AI and process intelligence. Sowmya is committed to building an ecosystem where bold ideas are born collaboratively, rapidly prototyped, and scaled into transformative impact — for Celonis and its customers

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Sowmya Kubendran