About the Competition: Every business in India built on owning your attention, your habit, or your indecision will discover that an AI agent has none of the three. This is the Great Rewiring. Sometime soon, Indians will stop doing things they've done for decades. They'll stop comparing the same product across three e-commerce apps before they buy it. They'll stop sharing their location with every delivery partner on WhatsApp. They'll stop setting a 9:58am alarm to fight for a tatkal ticket. An AI agent will do all of it, and more. As agents take over, value pools somewhere new and drains from someone old. This competition exists to work out where it goes, in what order, and what strange new companies get built in the space that opens up on the other side of The Great Rewiring. And you, students on campuses across the country, will be the ones who give the rest of us the first glimpse of this future. This year's edition of The Ken's Case Competition 2026 has Zerodha as the title partner. Teams pick unique and interesting problems India's consumers have shared first-hand, find surprising insights nobody noticed, design the agent that solves the problem, then take it to the companies who own the rails and find out where it breaks. Three Indian companies, Gnani, Pine Labs and Delhivery, all at the cutting edge of building agentic rails for India, are each opening a piece of their infrastructure to teams in this competition.
There are two tracks: one for product strategy to work out what to build, and one for builders who build it. No code is required to advance, reach the finale, or win. The competition runs for the next two months across multiple rounds, and culminates in a live finale in October. The top teams will fight it out at the finale, in front of a jury of India's leading founders, CEOs, academics, operators, and market experts, for ₹20 lakh in cash prizes. This includes cash prizes for the most innovative solutions across each of the rails. The best and most innovative solutions are then synthesised into The Ken's map of how agentic AI rewires India, published in October and read across the industry. This is the report that companies, startups, and VCs read and reread for years to understand how the disruption plays out: what gets built, where it comes from, where consumers find new value, who wins, and who's exposed.
Eligibility and Team Rules: Open to full-time college students, UG or PG, at any institution in India, regardless of discipline. Teams of 1 to 3, any discipline, any college, no cap on how many teams your campus sends in. Everyone on a team must be from the same institution. You pick your track, product strategy or building, when you register, and can change your mind up to the build stage. No code is required to advance, reach the finale, or win. Registration requires a college email ID. The Ken may validate anything a team submits, and may disqualify a team at its sole discretion.
Choose (registration open now, from 15 August). You'll get actual problems handed over by actual humans. Hundreds of The Ken's readers are telling us all the annoying, frustrating and repetitive parts of their daily lives, and the quirky workarounds they've built to handle them. Around 30 opportunity spaces, each backed by the evidence behind it, go live on 25 August. Pick the one you want to solve.
Stage 2: Assembly (opens 31 August) This is where your product strategy chops are tested. You'll discover a unique consumer insight around which you assemble your agent, then design it across the three rails any agent has to be built on: voice, payments and authorisation, and logistics.
Stage 3: Build Take your solution to the companies at the frontier of building agentic infrastructure in
India: Gnani for voice, Pine Labs for payments and authorisation, Delhivery for logistics. Teams on the build track go deeper and create agents. Teams on the product strategy track present their solutions and test them against what each rail can actually do today. Finale (October) The top teams fight it out at a finale, in front of a jury of India's leading founders, CEOs, academics, operators, and market experts, for ₹20 lakh in cash prizes. There are prizes for the most innovative solutions across each of the rails. The Agentic Map (published in October) The best and most innovative solutions are synthesised into The Ken's map of how agentic AI rewires India, read across the industry for years to understand what gets built, where it comes from, where consumers find new value, who wins, and who's exposed.
Judging: Every submission is read against the same five things, whichever track you enter and whether or not you write code. Evidence. Did a real person tell you this? Interviews, recordings, and what you found that you weren't looking for while designing the solution. Creativity. Is the solution fresh, counterintuitive, unique, and different? This is usually where AI-generated solutions fail.