Real-world experience – the ace up the sleeve of “hackers” at FSOFT HackAIthon 2025’s preliminary round

After three weeks of intensive product development, the preliminary round of HackAIthon 2025 saw an exciting showdown among 52 competing teams. By maximizing data resources and leveraging AI support, these teams delivered technological solutions expected to break new ground in productivity enhancement – clear evidence of the serious investment in integrating AI into every production and operational process, all aimed at optimizing productivity

Whether first-time participants or seasoned veterans of international competitions, all teams at FSOFT HackAIthon 2025 shared a common spirit: proactivity, creativity, long-term thinking, and a mindset that looked far beyond the competition itself

Real-world experience becomes the “ace”

Upon receiving their challenge from the organizers, FHM’s team faced a double hurdle: building an effective migration strategy while applying AI to optimize productivity throughout the database migration process. However, capitalizing on their strengths in Cloud and Data Migration, FHM’s team received in-depth guidance from internal experts. Team lead Nguyen Dang Khoa shared that during the preliminary round, FHM presented realistic data and demonstrated the effectiveness of using AI to boost migration productivity – directly addressing the competition’s core requirements.

Drawing on extensive experience from previous hackathons and large-scale projects with leading global clients in Oil & Gas and Media, CEP has mastered the latest cutting-edge technologies for building scalable systems, including AI. According to team lead Truong Quang Minh, CEP is confident in its understanding of AI and its ability to apply it to real-world business challenges as well as this HackAIthon’s task. In the preliminary round, CEP showcased the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of their SPARK (Smart Processing of Acquired Recorded Knowledge) product, featuring standout functions such as Smart Transcript, Session Outline and Summary, Mind Map, Q&A, and the SPARK AI Agent.

As a formidable contender at FSOFT HackAIthon 2025, SAS – the winner of both the Microsoft Sentinel Hackathon 2021 and Microsoft Sentinel Hackathon Spring 2022, leading global security hackathons – brought to the competition an AI system capable of automatically assessing and prioritizing risks and offering appropriate solutions, reducing manual investigation workloads and improving cloud security effectiveness. With broad experience across various cloud platforms at FSOFT, the team developed real-time data query APIs and zero-ETL solutions, designing automated flows to collect, analyze configurations, and assess risks using the matrix scoring system they utilize in real-world projects. Simultaneously, they created diverse testing environments to ensure solution accuracy. “Currently, security findings have risk levels assessed, but when visualized, users can see attack paths and related assets in case of breaches. If given the chance, our team aims to further develop Visualization Graph Base capabilities. Beyond recommendations, we are also working on functions to automatically implement recommendations based on the approved plan, and to self-assess and re-check findings,” shared Phung Quang Truong, SAS team lead.

Embracing Challenges to reach new heights

Participating in an AI hackathon for the first time, the FHM team said this “first-time” experience brought a unique spirit: not afraid to try, not afraid to fail, and always ready to learn. “We regarded the judges as clients and treated our presentation as a real pitching session, which motivated us to perfect our product”, said team lead Nguyen Dang Khoa.

Having joined multiple security hackathons before, SAS’s representative explained that the team always approaches challenges with creativity and a relentless drive to conquer new heights. According to the SAS lead, teamwork, discipline, and innovative thinking are the keys to success in every hackathon. “For SAS, it’s not just about completing a product, but about delivering practical solutions that add value to both the security community and the broader engineering field”, said Truong.

CEP’s representative added that, should they advance to the finals, the team would focus on perfecting not only product features but also performance and user experience. They also plan to invest more in their presentation, striving to convincingly tell their product’s story and clarify its real-world application potential – the ultimate value the competition aims to foster.

According to plan, the 13 top teams will advance to the finals on June 20. There, the champion will receive a prize worth 100 million VND, and outstanding solutions will be selected by the judges for further development and broader application.