Astana, 21 October. The final of the HackAlem AI hackathon took place on 16 October: 60 teams selected from 1,066 projects presented their work online, and winners were chosen in ten main and two special tracks, Real Digital reports.
According to the organisers, on 23 September the hackathon set a Guinness World Records title for the largest number of participants in an AI hackathon, 2,415 people. A hackathon (from hack, in programmers' slang a quick fix for a problem, and marathon) is a competition in which teams build working software prototypes in a short time.
Team Light won the logistics track with its Smart Procurement system, which predicts product shortages before they lead to lost sales. TAMYR took first place with Money Graph: the tool builds a network of money transfers, suggests the roles of participants and helps anti-money-laundering specialists decide whom to check first; an identified link, Real Digital cautions, does not in itself prove wrongdoing. In the Innovation track, KaskyrAlmaty won with Khattama (Kazakh for "minutes"), a service that turns meetings held in Kazakh and Russian into minutes with assigned tasks, owners and deadlines.
Team Gjgj presented Wind48, an AI agent that tracks the weather, analyses forecasts and prepares a daily generation plan for the dispatcher, explaining its decisions. Zhigitter won with Komplekt AI for an electrical goods shop: the assistant picks products to match a customer's task. In the special track of Kazakhtelecom, Singularity came first with OrgDiff, an agent that compares documents before and after a reorganisation and helps find duplicated functions and those that nobody is responsible for any more.
The prize fund for the main tracks was $200,000: $100,000 in cash from Astana Hub and $100,000 in OpenAI tokens; another $10,000 was awarded in the Astana Innovations track and computing resources from AI-Farabium worth $10,000 in the Kazakhtelecom track. The finalists showed prototypes built during the hackathon without further development, so their readiness for real-world use has yet to be tested.
What it means: A Kazakh AI hackathon drew a record number of participants and produced a set of prototypes for everyday work tasks: procurement, financial monitoring, minutes of meetings in two languages, planning of power generation. Whether they become working tools will be shown by pilot deployments.
Who benefits: The winners receive money, OpenAI tokens and computing resources. The companies the solutions were written for still have to test them in practice: in Real Digital's assessment, the main measure of success is not an impressive demo but how much time and money a solution saves and how many mistakes it helps avoid.
Background: The previous Guinness record for the number of participants in an AI hackathon, 2,089 people, was set in India in December 2025.
List of sources used: Real Digital, Real Digital
Artificial intelligence was used in preparing this material.
