The AWS GenAI Loft Bengaluru, held from July 7 to 16 at 2Moons inside 1MG Lido Mall, brought together startup founders and developers, AWS experts and community members in a vibrant, collaborative space.
Set up as a pop-up innovation hub, the GenAI Loft offered over a week of hands‑on workshops, technical deep dives and peer networking, all dedicated to strengthening developer fluency in AWS’s generative AI offerings.
Startups shared how the company’s cloud services have become central to their operations, citing scalability, reliability and breadth of offerings as key factors enabling them to build, innovate and bring products to market faster. For many, the GenAI Loft was not just an opportunity to learn but a chance to strengthen their relationship with AWS.
They described AWS teams as active partners in their growth, providing both the technology stack and the expertise to navigate rapidly evolving AI landscapes.
From the outset, attendees described the vibe as warm and energised, with a mix of cloud-native engineering, AI creativity and informal conversations over coffee. The space felt open, organised and focused. Attendees could drop into sessions or have one-on-one time with AWS solutions architects. The overall feeling was encouraging, inclusive and highly satisfying.
Hands‑On Sessions That Transformed Knowledge into Practice
One standout workshop, titled Beyond APIs: Standardising GenAI Communication with MCP, guided developers in implementing the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Hosted by AWS solutions architects Ayush Agrawal and Swapnil Tiwari, the session involved hands‑on exercises in converting existing application APIs to MCP, deploying a personal MCP server and integrating GenAI applications with a unified protocol.
Participants appreciated how the abstract concept of a protocol became tangible through live coding and deployable infrastructure, a practical skill they could apply immediately.
Moreover, an AWS GenAI Hackathon Challenge, held from July 10 to 11, brought together developers, data scientists and solutions architects for a 24-hour in-person build sprint.
The event offered hands-on access to Amazon Bedrock’s foundation models and mentorship from AWS AI/ML experts. Participants worked in teams to solve real-world problems across domains like smart user interfaces, developer tooling and operational productivity using agentic AI.
On July 14, AWS solutions architects Kalaivanan Sandamurthy and Keerthi Sangadala introduced participants to the transformative capabilities of Amazon Q Apps, the no-code generative AI tool within Amazon Q Business.
The session focused on how business and technical teams can harness the power of AI to streamline workflows, automate tasks and extract actionable insights, without writing a single line of code. Attendees learned how natural language prompts could be effortlessly turned into functional, enterprise-ready applications.
In one of the more hands-on sessions, AWS solutions architects Muthu Annamalai Chidambaram and Natasha S walked participants through a session titled ‘Supercharge Employee Productivity with Vibe Coding using Amazon Q Developer’.
They broke down how vibe coding fits into daily workflows and how it helps teams code faster, collaborate better and get more done. Real examples and clear takeaways made this one a crowd favourite.
One of the most talked-about sessions at the AWS GenAI Loft was ‘Driving Open Source AI Innovation using Llama’, hosted by Meta’s Ojasvi Bhatia and Nilesh Pandey. The room was packed as they walked the crowd through everything from Llama’s model architecture to real-world use cases that are already reshaping how companies build with AI.
Community Mixer & Hackathon: Building Together
Between the deep technical sessions, AWS also hosted the Bengaluru Launch Mixer for Startups on July 7, which brought together developers, startup leaders, investors and AWS experts in a relaxed networking format at the venue.
Moreover, there was a fireside chat featuring Chandan Raj, CTO of Bheem, Vivek Sharma, VP of engineering at ANSR Global and Goutam Kurumella, head solution architect at AWS.
“AWS has been instrumental over the past four or five years since our inception. It is our choice to use AWS, and it has always been because of the ease across the services and the scalability, reliability, and robustness which AWS brings in all its services,” said Sharma. He added that the company’s entire dev platform is entirely on AWS.
Raj said that Bheem has relied on AWS since its inception, building its solution using a serverless stack. “We’ve been with AWS right from the beginning,” he said, adding that both he and his CTO come from strong tech backgrounds and understand how crucial technology choices can be, especially in areas like scaling and scouting.
He emphasised that technology strategy and implementation policies can make or break a company, and AWS has played a key role in theirs. “The serverless framework and now services like Bedrock for our AI-based solutions have been tremendous partners in our journey,” he said.
The mix of people and opinions sparked thematic collaborations, informal mentorship and genuine connections. Attendees remarked that the sessions were technically rich, the atmosphere was inclusive, and they were leaving with meaningful contacts.
Final Reflections
The AWS GenAI Loft Bengaluru offered an exceptional mix of technical depth, hands-on workshops and community engagement. More than just an event, it became a space to learn, build and connect with the AWS GenAI ecosystem.The atmosphere was engaging and supportive, the venue was well-organised, and the sessions gave attendees a real sense of accomplishment and clarity. Whether someone attended a single workshop or participated in the full itinerary, the feedback was consistent—participants left not only more technically skilled but genuinely inspired.
