Currently, AI is striding into the era of Agentic AI, with the agent wave sweeping across all industries. However, the real demands of the industry have long shifted towards AI applications that can enter actual production environments and effectively solve industry pain points. Yet, between technical creativity and industrial landing, there are still numerous chasms such as high development thresholds, long verification chains, and difficult commercial monetization. The industry urgently needs to build a bridge connecting innovative ideas with real businesses.
During Huawei Connect 2026, the Huawei Cloud Starry Innovators Contest made a grand debut. Themed 'Use AI to Create Something Starry', it integrates competition and training, incorporating product technologies, development tools, practical competition topics, and industrial scenarios into the event. It provides a practical platform for various developers, turning vivid ideas into industrial practices. When the arena becomes a testing ground for Agentic AI technological innovation, and the ecosystem becomes fertile soil for AI to land in industries, this contest has long transcended the scope of traditional technical competitions, becoming a microcosm of the value blooming in Huawei Cloud's open ecosystem.
Diverse Competitions, Gathering Myriad Innovative Stars of Agentic AI
The nine competition tracks of the Huawei Cloud Starry Innovators Contest cover a wide range of topics without sticking to one pattern: there are the Robot Labor Contest, Enterprise Agent Innovation Contest, and China Mobile Agent Innovation Contest aimed at industrial landing; there is also the 'Lince' Algorithm Challenge targeting cutting-edge scientific research, focusing on the algorithm research of China's first invasive brain-computer interface; as well as the OPC Creativity Contest for independent developers and the Xiaohongshu Skill Innovation Contest for the content ecosystem; meanwhile, it includes the University Hackathon and the Walnut Coding AI Youth Hackathon for the broader youth.
At the same time, the contest truly achieves participation from contestants in diverse fields, ranging from developers in leading industrial enterprises, to university research teams and independent developers, and then to youth makers... Participants with different identities and backgrounds gather here to solve real business demands of enterprises and tackle cutting-edge scientific research topics. This fully interprets Huawei Cloud's new concept of 'being the most open cloud'. The empowerment targets are no longer limited to traditional professional developers, but embrace every creator with creativity in the agent era.
Finally, at the awards ceremony on September 19, the winning teams and developers from the nine competitions took the stage, with 27 competition honors and 102 winning developers announced on-site. Zhou Yuefeng, Director of Huawei and CEO of Huawei Cloud, attended the event and presented awards to the winners.
Integrating Competition and Training, Closing the Loop from Creativity to Real AI Applications
Notably, unlike most competitions that focus on comparison and neglect landing, the Huawei Cloud Starry Innovators Contest not only selects outstanding works but also closes the complete loop of 'creativity-development-verification-commercial landing', giving the works born in the arena the opportunity to truly step out of the arena and transform into products entering the real business scenarios of all walks of life.
Embodied AI is one of the popular hardcore industries today. The Robot Labor Contest and the Huawei Cloud Embodied AI Contest set up in this competition both revolve around this track. Relying on capabilities such as the Huawei Cloud CloudRobo Embodied AI Development Platform and Ascend Cloud services, participating teams truly felt the unique value brought by the integration of competition and training under the empowerment of the Huawei Cloud embodied AI ecosystem.
Among them, the Robot Labor Contest focuses on the scenario of 'robots actually working', where six embodied AI robot hardware enterprises compete in practical operations on the same stage. The competition does not involve staged performances but emphasizes practical results, testing the execution capabilities of robots in real tasks such as high-risk operations, industrial logistics, and complex inspections through on-site practical operations. Through the polishing of the competition, enterprises can quickly discover the shortcomings of algorithms in the real physical world, feed the arena test data back into product iteration, and accelerate the transition of embodied AI robots from the laboratory to real business sites such as power, manufacturing, and logistics.
Equally popular is the Enterprise Agent Innovation Contest. It not only provides participating enterprise developers with Huawei Cloud agent tools such as AgentArts, OfficeAce, open-source openJiuwen, and CodeArts Code Agent, paired with ecosystem assets like MCP and Skills created by Tianyancha in collaboration with Huawei Cloud, but also equips them with a dedicated technical support team to provide development Q&A throughout the process. It assists in building high-quality enterprise-level agents for real business scenarios such as office work, risk control, and services. The finals' achievements even gain opportunities for booth display, official media exposure, and business matchmaking, allowing the contest works the opportunity to land in the business processes of their own and partner enterprises.
Meanwhile, the Walnut Coding AI Youth Hackathon demonstrates the power of the Huawei Cloud ecosystem taking root downwards. Ten young makers, based on Huawei Cloud CodeArts, transformed their life observations into AI applications, giving birth to a batch of works close to daily life, such as the Community Stray Animal Guardian Assistant, Glass Anti-Collision Bird Protection Guard, and Classroom Air Little Guard, planting the seeds of AI innovation.
Looking at the entire competition, the arena is a training ground, and the competition process is also a process of technical training and solution polishing. Huawei Cloud opens rich Agent development tools and industry assets to the participants, bringing real industrial scenarios into the arena, so that the competition results are not just a work, but a product, building a bridge from creative ideas to real AI applications.
Just as Kang Xiaoyu, President of Huawei Cloud Partner and Ecosystem Department, stated in his speech at the awards ceremony, the Huawei Cloud Starry Innovators Contest is not just a technical competition, but an open ecosystem co-creation. Everyone bases themselves on real business pain points and relies on the agent platform to create a batch of valuable and landable innovative solutions.
Open Cloud, Reshaping the Development Paradigm in the Agentic AI Era
Behind the fruitful achievements of the competition, Huawei Cloud has built a complete capability system for the Agentic AI era, opening the technical platform throughout the whole process to empower developers in development, growth, and monetization. In the keynote speech at Huawei Connect 2026, Kang Xiaoyu, with the theme 'Reshaping the New Paradigm of Agentic AI Development with an Open Cloud', shared the underlying logic and latest layout of Huawei Cloud helping developers make good use of tools and use AI to solve industry problems through the dual-wheel drive of 'Innovation Productivity × Open Ecosystem Power'.
In Kang Xiaoyu's view, agents have lowered the threshold for AI innovation, but there is still a gap from prototype to production. To this end, Huawei Cloud proposes a new development paradigm in the Agentic era—breaking through technical bottlenecks with innovation productivity, penetrating industry barriers with open ecosystem power, freeing developers from tedious underlying infrastructure management, focusing on business goals, and improving the whole-process efficiency from development and deployment to O&M.
In the dimension of innovation productivity, Huawei Cloud has upgraded from a 'resource supplier' to a 'task completion platform', focusing on building a three-layer system of innovation foundation, innovation engine, and innovation accelerator: relying on the AgentArts agent platform to consolidate the innovation foundation, reducing developers' basic engineering investment, and ensuring the stability and controllability of agent applications; taking Huawei Cloud CodeArts, DocZip, and AI Shell to create innovation engines for development, documentation, and O&M scenarios, deeply integrating agents into the development process; and leveraging the Handson Best Practice Center to cover multiple practice directions, connecting the whole chain of AI applications, and shortening the Agent development and landing cycle.
At the same time, Huawei Cloud has also comprehensively upgraded the developer rights and interests system. From the three dimensions of 'Experience Center - Growth Center - Competition Platform', it provides zero-threshold product tools and cloud resources, multi-dimensional growth incentives, competition achievement display, and business opportunity links. This includes getting exposure opportunities and connecting with industrial business opportunities through top-tier competitions like the Starry Innovators Contest, helping developers truly achieve 'supported technology, incentivized growth, and valuable innovation'.
In the dimension of open ecosystem power, Huawei Cloud relies on the Industry AI Dreamworks, AI Asset Plaza, and Cloud Store to build an open ecosystem, connecting industries, assets, and markets, helping developers break through industry barriers and achieve commercial landing. Among them, the Industry AI Dreamworks is equipped with 7 major zones, over 500 valuable assets, and industry large models, empowering developers' AI innovation and industrial landing; the newly released AI Asset Plaza, as a hub for AI asset aggregation and distribution, connects asset supply and demand, promoting Agent industrial landing; the continuously upgraded Cloud Store optimizes the transaction chain with AI, and has currently gathered over 1,200 AI scenario-based applications, covering more than ten industries, reducing the operational pressure on developers.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, in the Agentic AI era, AI innovation is no longer the exclusive territory of a few large companies. Under the wave of large-scale industrial AI landing, every shining idea deserves to be seen and should be realized. The Huawei Cloud Starry Innovators Contest 'Uses AI to Create Something Starry', gathering myriad innovative stars of Agentic AI; Huawei Cloud deeply cultivates the 'silicon-based black soil' on the cloud, being the 'most open cloud', and reshaping the new paradigm of Agentic AI development—the two promote each other and are undoubtedly born for this purpose.
Data shows that Huawei Cloud has so far deeply cultivated more than 30 industries, served over 100,000 enterprise customers, and gathered over 10 million developers; in the AI field, it has promoted the landing of more than 500 AI scenarios, and joined hands with over 50,000 partners to jointly expand new spaces for industrial intelligence, truly practicing technological open symbiosis and industrial AI win-win. Facing the future, we have reason to believe that the fertile soil of the open ecosystem cultivated by Huawei Cloud will continue to illuminate more stars and bloom more value.