330 Students From Across Campus Sign up for Smith’s Agentic AI Challenge

Preparing students for the next frontier was the goal of the recent Agentic AI Challenge at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. Finalists presented solutions to real industry problems with cutting-edge agentic systems on April 24, 2026.

Assistant Professor of Information Systems Manmohan Aseri said six real-world problems were developed with companies, as well as members of Smith’s Academic Advisory Council.

Aseri was originally worried about the level of difficulty of the problems, but that didn’t deter the 330 students who signed up for the event. “I’m happy that 67 teams were registered.” Participants ranged from across the entire University of Maryland, with students not only from Smith’s finance and information systems undergraduate programs and MBA students but also students from the department of mathematics, economics and biology.

“Everyone in this room did not have to be here,” said Balaji Padmanabhan, associate dean of strategic initiatives, dean’s professor of Decisions, Operations & Informational Technologies and director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Business. “Everyone here chose to do this and that says a lot about the quality of everyone in this room.”

Students had over four weeks to develop a prototype and deploy intelligent systems focused on measurable outcomes, cost-efficiency, reliability and safety. From a field of 43 teams, their submissions were divided into eight groups. From there, judges selected the top teams to present on the final day of the competition.

The panel of judges included alumni, advisory council members, industry experts and faculty. Five judges presided over the final presentations including Chirag Arora ’11, executive director at Morgan Stanley, Stephanie Cummings, strategic partnerships development manager at Google and member of the MiM Advisory Council, Norma McCowin, MBA ’20, senior director at Kaiser Permanente and chair of the MSIS Advisory Council, Bharti Motwani, associate clinical professor and academic director, Online MS in Business Analytics, and Elizabeth Sisti, executive director at Morgan Stanley.

As the judges addressed the teams, McCown said she is “blown away” each year by how much the students’ skills have developed. In the end, it was Team Synapse who took the top prize with their solution for global pharmaceutical distributor partner OnAsset to assist with cargo monitoring of temperature-sensitive transport. Students from the winning team included graduate students from the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences (CMNS), Nikhil Sumesh MS ’26, Yash Oulkar MS ’26, Mukul Rayana MS ’26, Rahul Sharma MS ’26 and Karthik Ramanathan MS ’26.

Aseri said another competition for the upcoming 2026-2027 academic year will take place and, as technology continues to evolve, it may impact the type of challenges presented in the competition for students to solve.