Agentic AI for Sustainability – 3rd AIM Hackathon Recap

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A Hackathon Without Judges

This time, AIM tried something different. Instead of a jury or traditional pitches, each team's AI agent had one goal: answer as many sustainability-related questions correctly as possible. The challenge (GitHub repo) tested not only coding skills but also creativity and prompt engineering.

Friday Kickoff

The weekend started with an inspiring keynote from Felix Krause, "Beyond Buzzwords: Finding Clarity in the AI Hype Era", and a live demo from ElevenLabs. After networking and an afterparty hosted by PwC Österreich, teams returned Saturday morning ready to build.

The Challenge

Powered by Anthropic's Claude models and the new Model Context Protocol (MCP), participants had to create autonomous agents capable of integrating multiple tools to solve real-world sustainability questions:

• Retrieve and analyze data from PDFs 📄
• Query SQL databases 💾
• Search Wikipedia 🌐
• Convert currencies 💱

Teams also received insights from univie innovation about startup support programs before diving into their builds.

Creative Approaches

Despite the time pressure, the results were impressive. Some teams used vector databases for semantic PDF retrieval, others applied regex heuristics to manage tool use, and several optimized model calls by switching between small and large LLMs.

Winning Teams

Rank	Team
🥇	The Nightwalkers
🥈	Fantasticka Stvorka
🥉	Small Language Models

Key Takeaways

1. Agentic AI is here to stay — Tools like MCP make it easier to connect LLMs to real data.
2. Collaboration sparks innovation — Teams from different backgrounds tackled complex technical problems together.
3. Sustainability meets technology — The challenge proved that AI can help analyze, reason, and act on global impact data.

Final Thoughts

The third AIM Hackathon showed how much potential lies in connecting AI with sustainability. A huge thank you to our partners — Anthropic, ElevenLabs, PwC Österreich, Impact Hub Vienna, Klartext AI, Texterous, augedo, and univie innovation — and to our amazing AIM team for another inspiring event at the intersection of AI and purpose.