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Hey there, and welcome to the Affinda AI Innovation Challenge Track Guide! This page has everything you need about this year's challenge: the brief, the three tracks, what to submit and how you'll be judged. Read it with your team, pick a track, and start building.

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🎪 The challenge

Fieldday Events is a five-person events company that runs club nights and small gigs across Melbourne. The City of Melbourne wanted a new summer festival for young people, and Fieldday's founder, Jess, pitched for it. Her run of sold-out nights won the City over, and Fieldday was awarded Riverside: a three-day riverfront festival in mid-December, with up to 15,000 people a day.

To get the City over the line, Jess agreed to one condition. If Fieldday isn't on track two weeks out, it pays for an experienced production company to take over. Riverside will go ahead either way. But Fieldday now has ten weeks to deliver 60 artists, 40 food vendors, 300 volunteers and 15,000 people a day with five staff, and paying for a takeover would wipe out the company.

This is where you come in. You're a friend of Jess's, and you know how to build with AI. She's asked you to show her, in 48 hours, how AI could let her team pull this off.

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Your challenge: Build an AI-powered product that helps Fieldday successfully deliver Riverside at a scale they've never operated before.

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The one-sentence version

Pick one of three people (or groups) at Riverside, find a real moment where things go wrong for them, and build a product where AI does something that wasn't possible before.

💡 What you can assume

• No coding experience needed. No-code tools, AI coding tools and vibe coding are all welcome. We judge the product and the thinking, not the code. New to AI tools? Start with the AI Starter Pack.
• Start fresh. Fieldday has no existing systems you need to plug into.
• Go narrow. You only need to solve one problem well, not run the whole festival.
• AI should do real work in your product, not just sit on top of it.
• Fill in the details. Anything the brief doesn't say, you can decide, as long as it's realistic.
• Use AI to build, not to think for you. The ideas and decisions should be your own: judges will ask you about them.

🧭 Skip the obvious first idea

When most people hear "AI for a festival", they reach for one of two things: a festival chatbot that answers questions, or a dashboard that flags problems. Both are fine starting points, and you won't lose marks just for building one. But they're the idea most teams will have first, and they rarely make the most of what AI can do. The strongest entries start from a specific person in a specific moment, and ask what would genuinely change their day.

🛤️ The three tracks

Each track is a different person (or group) to build for. Every track uses the same brief and the same judging criteria. Open a track for the full guide.