Twelve Teams, Two Days, One Brief: The AI Agents Hackathon at the American University in Dubai

On October 23 and 24, 2026, the AUD Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center (AEIC)

at the American University in Dubai hosted the AI Agents Hackathon, organised in

collaboration with Red Rock Technology. Around fifty students, working in twelve

teams, had two days to design, build and present an AI agent, competing for a cash

prize awarded by Red Rock.

The brief was open. The standard was not.

An Open Brief

No industry was assigned. The theme was AI agents, in full: systems that reason, act and carry

work forward on behalf of the people who use them.

That choice was deliberate. Deciding where an agent creates real value is as much a part of

the work as building it. Each team had to identify a problem worth solving, design an agent

around it, and present it in front of the room.

On the final day, teams presented their work once more before the award session, which

opened with a keynote by Red Rock CEO Michele Fiscalini, covered in a dedicated article on

this blog.

The Podium

Twelve teams competed. Three took the podium.

1- Autopilot, Sofia Vishnyakova and Vibhank Mehra

2- Credit Bridge, Emmad Abbas, Majid Mohammad and Abdelrahman Esam Yaser

3- PopulusAI, Radin Tafteh, Jacob Toma and Marwan Azab

Red Rock congratulates the winners, and every team that took up the challenge. Taking an

agent from idea to presentation in two days is not a small achievement.

Why Red Rock Invests in the Next Generation

The hackathon is part of a longer commitment. Red Rock has worked with the American

University in Dubai for some time, including through a continuing internship programme for

AUD students. The hackathon extends that relationship from learning into building.

The logic is structural. The UAE has made artificial intelligence a national priority, and that

priority will be delivered by the engineers, founders and operators now sitting in its

universities. Investing in them early is not philanthropy. It is infrastructure.

Red Rock does not approach this from the outside. AI agents run across its own processes

every day, and the same principles it applies in its work, governance, control and

accountability, are the ones it brings to the students it works with.

Red Rock thanks the AUD Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center, Dr. Maya Abou Zahr and

the AEIC team for hosting the hackathon, and every student who spent two days building.

Twelve teams built agents in two days. The next step is building them for the real world.

If you lead an institution building the systems it will depend on for the next decade and want to

understand what Red Rock can deliver, get in touch with the team.