Build an agent with Google Cloud and one of 5 star-studded partners: IBM, Grafana Labs, Parallel, ClickHouse, or Replit.
Step onto the studio lot! Google Cloud is teaming up with an all-star partner ecosystem for Agentic Cinema: The Blockbuster Hackathon, a challenge for builders ready to turn enterprise complexity into a summer blockbuster.
This hackathon brings together Google Cloud and five technology partners: IBM, Grafana Labs, Parallel, ClickHouse, and Replit. Together, they give your agents the real-world capabilities they need to take on production-scale problems.
Good to know: Projects can only use Google Cloud AI tools and your chosen partner's built-in AI features—no other AI models, agent frameworks, or AI APIs, including the tools you use to write your code during development. Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist are your safe path for AI-assisted coding throughout this hackathon.
About the prize structure: This hackathon features five identical prize pools for each partner track. Each track awards a first-place ($7,500), second-place ($4,500), and third-place ($3,000) winner.
Whether you see yourself as the Director architecting an autonomous agent network, the Technical Producer wiring up secure data pipelines, or the Studio Head enforcing governance across a multi-agent workflow, there's a place for you here.
Projects need to solve a real bottleneck across the entertainment and media value chain, whether that's the workflow of a filmmaker, screenwriter, studio crew, or fan.
Your project doesn’t have to be a tool for a two-hundred-person production team. You can also build for the solo YouTuber or TikTok creator who writes, shoots, edits, and posts alone.
Lean on Gemini's multimodal and generative capabilities as you build: generate VFX concept art and storyboards with Imagen 3, score a scene with Lyria 3, voice dialogue with Gemini TTS, or transcribe and caption raw footage.
Whether you're orchestrating an autonomous agent network, wiring up a secure data pipeline, or enforcing governance across a multi-agent system, your agent should do more than answer questions. It should plan, act, and get the job done.
Now let's take a closer look at each partner and what they bring to the hackathon.
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IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud, AI, and consulting expertise, helping clients in more than 175 countries streamline operations and capitalize on their data. For this track, IBM is bringing IBM Bob, an AI-assisted development environment, into your build process. See all the details on the IBM partner track.
Some ideas to spark your thinking:
Your project must be built using IBM Bob as part of the development process. Use of Confluent is optional but strongly encouraged to power real-time and event-driven workflows. Strong submissions should also demonstrate how AI meaningfully improves a workflow, enhances decision-making, elevates a customer experience, or drives a measurable operational outcome.
The Grafana stack brings metrics, logs, traces, profiles, dashboards, and alerting together in one place, and the free Grafana Cloud tier covers everything you need for this hackathon.
Give your agent live production context with the Grafana Cloud MCP server. Pair it with Grafana Cloud AI Observability to track your own agent's LLM calls, token cost, latency, and MCP tool activity while you build. See all the details for the Grafana Labs partner track.
Some ideas to get you started:
Your project must actively use the Grafana stack at runtime, primarily through the Grafana Cloud MCP server (the official grafana/mcp-grafana server or the hosted Grafana Cloud MCP endpoint). Grafana Cloud AI Observability is a good complement but doesn't satisfy this requirement on its own. The MCP server connection is what's checked.
One important note: the hosted Grafana Cloud MCP server authenticates users interactively, so there's no service-account or machine-token option. Build and record your demo somewhere you can complete the one-time browser authorization. If your project needs a fully unattended, server-side agent, use the open-source Grafana MCP server with a service-account token instead.
Parallel develops web infrastructure for AI agents, with a vertically integrated stack spanning crawling, indexing, search, extraction, reasoning, and monitoring so your agent gets accurate, fresh, and traceable information from the open web.
Ground your agent in live, verifiable information from across the web using Parallel's Search API. See all the details for the Parallel partner track.
Some ideas to spark your thinking:
Your project must actively use Parallel's Search API at runtime, for example through the official parallel-web SDK (Python or TypeScript), a supported integration such as the Vercel AI SDK's @parallel-web/ai-sdk-tools or LangChain's ParallelWebSearchTool, or a Grounding configuration using Parallel Web Search as the search provider. Referencing Parallel in your README alone doesn't satisfy this requirement. The integration must be present in your code.
ClickHouse is one of the fastest and most resource-efficient real-time databases and data warehouses, built for data-intensive and large-scale workloads, from interactive, user-facing applications to ad hoc historical analysis.
Connect your agent to a live ClickHouse Cloud or self-hosted cluster and let it query real data in real time. See all the details for the ClickHouse partner track.
Some ideas to spark your thinking:
Your project must actively use ClickHouse at runtime via the official ClickHouse MCP server (mcp-clickhouse), connecting to a ClickHouse Cloud or self-hosted cluster. Use of ClickHouse Agent Skills during development is optional but encouraged.
Note: this must be ClickHouse's own MCP server—connecting to ClickHouse only through Grafana's MCP server does not satisfy this track.
Replit lets anyone turn an idea into working software using natural language, bringing code, AI, database, authentication, security, testing, and publishing into one platform.
Use Replit Agent to build your project, then deploy it directly on Replit. See all the details for the Replit partner track.
Some ideas to spark your thinking:
Your project must be built using Replit Agent as part of the development process, and the finished project must be hosted and deployed directly on Replit (a project URL on a replit.app or replit.dev domain). Projects not deployed on Replit's platform won't meet this requirement, regardless of how the code was written.
Here's how to get started:
With Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise as your studio, and five partner platforms giving your agent real capabilities, the possibilities are wide open. We can't wait to see what you build!
