Unleashing Innovation: The 2026 AWS AI League Championship
Exploring the Future of Intelligent Agents and Model Customization
A Journey Through Competition and Creativity in AI
AWS AI League: A Platform for Innovation and Skill Development
Unlocking AI Innovation: A Look into the AWS AI League
Building intelligent agents capable of addressing complex, real-world tasks presents a considerable challenge for organizations. Instead of solely depending on large, pre-trained foundation models, many enterprises find that customizing and fine-tuning smaller, more specialized models can yield better results in their specific contexts. This is where the AWS AI League comes into play, offering a dynamic program designed to empower businesses to overcome AI development challenges through competition and innovation.
The AWS AI League’s Premier Event: A Recap
In 2025, the inaugural AWS AI League competition captivated developers, data scientists, and business leaders worldwide. This exciting event brought together bright minds focused on solving pressing issues using cutting-edge AI technologies. The grand finale at AWS re:Invent 2025 showcased the ingenuity and skills of cross-functional teams from leading organizations. Participants demonstrated their prowess in creating effective prompts, fine-tuning models, and building powerful AI agents.
🏆 Congratulations to the 2025 AWS AI League Champions! After a rigorous contest, the winners were:
- Hemanth Vediyera from Cisco – 1st Place
- Ross Williams from Aqfer – 2nd Place
- Deepesh Khanna from Capital One – 3rd Place
This blog post delves into how the AWS AI League fosters competition to help participants grasp model customization and agent-building concepts while addressing real-world challenges through engaging formats.
What is the AWS AI League Championship?
The AWS AI League experience kicks off with a comprehensive, hands-on 2-hour workshop led by AWS experts, followed by an opportunity for self-paced experimentation. The culmination of this journey is an exciting gameshow-style grand finale, where participants present their AI innovative solutions aimed at tackling real business challenges.
Building on the success of the 2025 program, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the AWS AI League 2026 Championship. This year introduces two new exciting challenges:
- Agentic AI Challenge: Build intelligent agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to address real-world business problems.
- Model Customization Challenge: Utilize the latest fine-tuning recipes in SageMaker Studio to tailor models for specific use cases.
This year’s prize pool has also doubled to $50,000, with tracks catering to participants of all skill levels—from beginners to experts.
Build Intelligent Agents with the Agentic AI Challenge
The AWS AI League now features an exhilarating agentic AI challenge where participants build intelligent agents to solve complex problems in a dynamic, game-style competition. Agents navigate through a maze-like environment, tackling various challenges while aiming to reach a treasure chest, mirroring real-world situations.
Participants will customize their agents using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore primitives, allowing for secure and scalable production-grade solutions. They can select specific models for supervisory roles, create custom tools like Bedrock Guardrails, AgentCore Memory, and AWS Lambda functions to assist their agents in overcoming obstacles.
Throughout the competition, participants receive real-time feedback on their agents’ performance from a large language model (LLM) evaluator, enabling them to iterate effectively. The grand finale allows finalists to showcase their innovations in a live, game-show format, where evaluation criteria focus on time efficiency, accuracy, and planning capabilities.
Customize Models to Outperform Larger Models
The AWS AI League expands the scope of its model customization challenge, enabling participants to apply the latest advancements in fine-tuning techniques. Within Amazon SageMaker Studio, participants can access powerful new training recipes designed to produce highly effective, domain-specific models.
The challenge begins with honing customization skills and applying advanced fine-tuning methods to enhance model performance. Customized models are then compared to larger reference models on a leaderboard, earning points for each accurate response. This competitive framework fosters an environment for builders to showcase their skills and explore new opportunities.
Conclusion
The AWS AI League is revolutionizing how organizations approach AI development. By turning competition into a catalyst for innovation, AWS accelerates builders’ abilities to showcase their AI skills and enhance solutions.
To learn more about hosting an AWS AI League competition within your organization, visit the AWS AI League page. For a deeper dive into intelligent agents and model customization, explore the AWS AI training catalog on AWS Skill Builder.
About the Authors
Marc Karp is an ML Architect with the Amazon SageMaker Service team, specializing in helping customers manage ML workflows at scale. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling and exploring new places.
Natasya K. Idries is the Product Marketing Manager for AWS AI/ML Gamified Learning Programs, dedicated to democratizing AI/ML skills through impactful educational initiatives. Outside of work, she loves to travel, cook Southeast Asian cuisines, and explore nature.
By participating in the AWS AI League, you’re not just learning; you’re paving the way for the future of AI innovation!