The Vietnam AI Innovation Challenge 2026 final drew nearly 2,000 people solving operations problems with AI in 48 hours. Here is what happens when a system like that runs for real, every day, for over a year - and what it actually saves.
A graduation certificate takes hours to prepare - not because the content is complex, but because staff have to open five different pieces of software to pull the data, then retype it by hand into Word. Multiply that by a few hundred students a term, and the loss stops being trivial.
Right now, nearly 2,000 people are solving exactly this problem in 48 hours
The Vietnam AI Innovation Challenge 2026 (VAIC) final ran July 17-19 at the FPT building in Hanoi, drawing over 300 teams - including international competitors - building AI prototypes for finance, healthcare, education, agriculture, logistics, public services and business operations, mentored by people from Google Research, Stanford, NVIDIA and Meta.
That is what a competition does best: prove an idea works in a short window. But a 48-hour prototype and a system that has run every day for over a year are two different problems.
The real problem: when "operations are fine" means five disconnected tools
A vocational college in Vietnam used to run its daily work across five separate platforms - one for attendance, one for grades, a separate tool for scheduling, spreadsheets for student records, and manual Word documents for certificates and transcripts.
None of it talked to each other. Staff entered the same data multiple times, mistakes were routine, and the school paid over 300 million dong a year in subscriptions for tools that couldn't communicate. No off-the-shelf platform understood Vietnam's vocational training structure - the faculty/major/subject hierarchy, the theory/practice split, or generating Vietnamese-language documents with correct diacritics.
What SIBA built
We spent the first two weeks working directly with administrative staff, teachers and department heads - mapping every process before writing a line of code. The result is the School Information System: a single platform replacing all five old tools.
flowchart LR
A[Attendance] --> HT[One single system]
B[Grades] --> HT
C[Scheduling] --> HT
D[Student records in Excel] --> HT
E[Certificates in Word] --> HTFrom student management, attendance, grading and scheduling through to a drag-and-drop certificate template editor that exports Vietnamese-accurate PDFs in seconds.
Measured results after more than a year in operation:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms in daily use | 5 | 1 |
| Annual subscription cost | over 300 million dong | owns the system outright |
| Certificate and transcript generation | hours | seconds |
| Source of truth | duplicated across tools | one single source |
And one thing money doesn't measure: staff were comfortable with the new system within a day.
Is your organization still at the "five disconnected tools" stage?
- A simple task requires opening several pieces of software just to finish
- New hires take a week to get comfortable
- Nobody is quite sure which spreadsheet has the correct numbers
If any of that sounds familiar, that's where to start - not with the newest technology, but with an actual workflow survey to find out exactly where the losses are.
You can do the first step yourself today: write your current process out on paper, step by step. Most organizations find two or three steps that are simply unnecessary - remove those first, before spending anything on software.
What is disconnected operations actually costing you?
SIBA surveys the real workflow first, measures the specific bottleneck, and only then proposes a solution - the same approach we used to build this system. Book a free workflow survey with us.
Source: VnExpress, July 16, 2026. School Information System figures from the SIBA project record.