After more than 30 days of building AI agents and intense competition, MSB AI Hackathon 2026 came to a close with its final round, held under the theme “Ignite Your AI Agent.” The Top 30 and Top 10 teams presented AI agent projects developed to address real-world banking challenges. The competition brought together more than 300 participants from MSB, TNEX, and TNTALENT to explore how AI can be applied in their day-to-day work.
Behind MSB AI Hackathon lies a bigger question: How can businesses drive widespread AI adoption and make AI an integral part of everyday work?
The MSB AI Hackathon finale took place on September 24, 2026. Photo: MSB
Why Should AI Adoption Start with Employees?
Many businesses begin their AI journey with training programs. However, theoretical knowledge alone is not enough to drive transformation when employees lack the opportunities and motivation to turn what they learn into action.
After a training session, employees may still face four familiar barriers:
- Technical barriers remain: The gap between knowing about AI and being able to build with it is still significant.
- Limited hands-on experience: Employees lack opportunities to apply AI to real-world business challenges.
- Insufficient support: They need guidance and resources to get started and bring their ideas to life.
- Knowledge without action: Even when employees understand AI, they may lack the motivation to apply it in their work.
An alternative is a bottom-up approach. Rather than waiting for direction from senior leadership, employees start with the challenges they encounter in their own work, identify relevant use cases, experiment with solutions, and create value through AI.
- Start with real business problems: Employees understand their own pain points and are well positioned to identify where AI can deliver value.
- Experiment with available resources: Access to company data, technology, and support teams helps accelerate experimentation while reducing risk.
- Drive innovation across departments: AI becomes more than the responsibility of technology teams; it develops into a capability shaped by the real needs of the entire organization.
Team FinPulse (right) presents its NEXA project to the judging panel (left). Photo: MSB
Claw-a-thon as a Service: Driving Innovation from Within
Claw-a-thon as a Service, GreenNode’s end-to-end hackathon consulting and delivery initiative, helps accelerate the AI agent development journey from ideation and building to validating concepts within a short timeframe. Each participant takes ownership of their project, managing their own time and resources while defining the problem they want to solve.
What makes this approach distinctive is that use cases emerge directly from real challenges employees face at work. This allows participants to develop solutions based on their own expertise and experience, regardless of their position within the organization.
More importantly, Claw-a-thon as a Service provides a controlled, low-risk environment for experimentation. Teams can develop ideas in parallel without directly affecting production systems or sensitive data. Throughout the competition, participants receive ongoing guidance and supervision while adhering to the organization’s established IT processes.
With this approach, businesses can quickly validate the feasibility and potential value of individual ideas, identify promising solutions, and determine which ones warrant further investment and real-world deployment.
Key Milestones from MSB AI Hackathon 2026
After more than a month of intense competition, MSB AI Hackathon 2026 concluded with presentations before the judging panel across two tracks. More than 100 of MSB’s top participants advanced to the final stages, showcasing innovative solutions across three categories: AI For Me, AI For Team, and AI For Customers.
The competition delivered impressive results:
- 10 billion tokens consumed throughout the competition.
- 226+ activities conducted during Build Week.
- 92 teams developing solutions to real-world banking challenges.
- 300+ participants from diverse business functions, including Technology, Strategy & Innovation, Business, and Risk Management.
- 100% built from scratch: All participants developed their solutions from the ground up using OpenCode, AgentBase, and AI MaaS.
These achievements would not have been possible without the dedication of the competing teams, the enthusiasm of their supporters, and the behind-the-scenes efforts of the organizing committee. Together, they made MSB AI Hackathon a vibrant and inspiring journey, fostering a strong culture of learning, collaboration, and teamwork across MSB.
Final Results
GreenNode Ignition Award
- Team: Jolibee
- Project: CreditPilot360 - An AI assistant that helps relationship managers automate credit assessment workflows for large corporate clients.
First Prize
- Team: WEFI
- Project: M-You - A proactive personal finance assistant integrated into the MSB app.
Second Prize
- Team: Jolibee
- Project: CreditPilot360 - An AI assistant that helps relationship managers automate credit assessment workflows for large corporate clients.
Third Prize
- Team: SUP_SALE
- Project: SUP-SALE - An intelligent AI interaction layer connecting customers, employees, and banking data.
Best Pitch Award
- Team: Cerebro
- Project: Cerebro - A unified semantic intelligence platform that connects enterprise data for AI use cases.
Looking back at the finale, MSB AI Hackathon 2026 reaffirmed that AI is not just a technology story, it is also a story about people.
As Nguyen Hoang Linh - Member of the Board of Directors and CEO of MSB, shared during Hack Day on September 24, 2026:
For Vu Thanh Tung - CEO of GreenNode, the most memorable aspect of the competition was the participants’ determination to overcome technical barriers, explore bold ideas, and pursue solutions that could deliver tangible business impact.
GreenNode’s Mission to Drive Enterprise-Wide AI Adoption
GreenNode is developing Claw-a-thon as a comprehensive service offering that combines consulting with end-to-end enterprise hackathon delivery. GreenNode works alongside businesses through in-depth training, consultation, and hands-on implementation support, helping teams turn initial ideas into practical solutions.
Through this approach, MSB employees were able to build AI agents themselves and apply AI to solve real challenges in their day-to-day work.
For GreenNode, AI adoption goes beyond simply using AI tools. It means empowering people to build AI solutions proactively and put them into practice. Every AI agent created represents another step toward developing AI capabilities from within the organization, with employees becoming the people who build, apply, and generate value from AI.
Vu Thanh Tung - CEO of GreenNode, delivers his remarks. Photo: MSB
This is the vision GreenNode will continue to pursue in the years ahead: helping businesses embed AI across their organizations and make it part of everyday work, grounded in real business needs and delivering sustainable value over time.
