2026-08-29 · 5 min read
I recently took part in the GITAM Internal SIH Hackathon 2026 as part of a team, working on a project called Power Assist AI. This post is a straightforward account of what we built, why we built it, and where it stands right now - without inflating what a short hackathon build actually is.
The GITAM Internal SIH Hackathon is GITAM's internal round tied to the Smart India Hackathon process, where student teams pick a problem statement and build toward a working solution within a limited time. Like most hackathons of this format, the pressure isn't just technical - it's deciding quickly what's actually worth building in the time available, and then building it.
Our team looked at a problem that shows up in almost every office: when something breaks - a VPN connection, the internet, a shared printer, a laptop issue - employees usually report it informally. A phone call to the IT desk, a message in a group chat, or just walking over and asking someone to take a look. That works at a small scale, but it gives the IT team no structured way to see what's outstanding, what's urgent, or which issues keep recurring.
We wanted to explore whether a simple, structured reporting workflow could make that process easier for both sides - the employee reporting the issue, and the IT team trying to track and resolve it.
Power Assist AI is an IT help desk and technical issue reporting application aimed at office employees and IT support teams. The core idea is intentionally simple: give employees a clear way to report a technical problem with the relevant details, and give IT teams a clearer view of what's been reported so they can manage and respond to it more efficiently.
It's designed to be accessible from both desktop and mobile devices, since IT issues don't only come up while someone is sitting at their desk.
The workflow we designed centers on the employee side and the IT side:
We scoped the reporting flow around the kinds of technical problems that come up most often in an office setting:
Keeping the categories concrete, rather than a single open-ended text box, was a deliberate choice - it made the reporting flow faster for employees and easier to reason about on the IT side.
Within the hackathon's time window, our focus was on getting the core reporting workflow working end to end rather than spreading effort across a long list of features. As a team, we split responsibilities across the areas of the application and worked toward a functional prototype that reflected the workflow we'd scoped out, rather than trying to cover every possible IT support scenario in one pass.
Working as part of a team under a hackathon's time constraints is a different exercise than building a personal project at your own pace. Decisions have to be made faster, scope has to be protected deliberately, and coordinating with teammates on what each person is responsible for matters as much as the individual work itself. It reinforced something I've noticed in other team and operational settings: a lot of the real work in a short build window is agreeing on what not to build yet, so the team can actually finish something coherent.
The main challenge was scope. An IT help desk system can grow in a lot of directions - ticket routing, priority queues, notifications, reporting dashboards - and it would have been easy to spend the hackathon designing all of it on paper instead of shipping a working reporting flow. Keeping the first version focused on employees reporting an issue and IT teams being able to see it was the right call for the time we had.
The project also reinforced the importance of practical problem-solving and user experience over building something technically elaborate. A help desk tool only works if reporting an issue is genuinely easier than the informal alternative - if it isn't, employees will just go back to messaging IT directly.
Power Assist AI is currently a working prototype, built and refined during the hackathon based on the features and workflow our team scoped out. It reflects the core reporting flow we set out to build, though it hasn't been deployed for real office use yet, and the feature set is intentionally limited to what we could build and test within the hackathon window.
There's a clear set of next steps if this were taken further:
None of these are built yet - they're the logical next steps, not claims about the current prototype.
The hackathon provided an opportunity to explore how a simple and structured digital workflow could improve the way technical issues are reported in a workplace. Power Assist AI, in its current form, is a prototype built by a team within a hackathon's time constraints - not a finished product. But the project helped us understand the importance of user experience, issue management, and practical problem-solving when designing something meant to replace an informal, everyday workflow. Power Assist AI is currently being developed as a prototype, with plans for further improvements and additional functionality if the team continues building on it.
An IT help desk and technical issue reporting application built with a team at the GITAM Internal SIH Hackathon 2026, letting employees report problems like VPN, network, and software issues for IT teams to track and resolve.
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