Within the program, the Zalo AI Challenge 2025 awards ceremony honored the most outstanding teams after a highly competitive journey among 1,060 teams nationwide. This year, the competition was designed to be streamlined yet application-oriented, focusing on two real-world AI challenges: AeroEyes – applying AI to develop drone control algorithms for search and rescue missions, and RoadBuddy – developing a driving assistant capable of understanding dashcam video content and answering questions related to traffic signs, signals, and road situations.

Amid thousands of teams from universities, research institutes, and technology companies, the CtelAI team from CMC Telecom won first prize in the RoadBuddy category. The team consisted of two young engineers, Nguyen Dich Nhat Minh and Nguyen Tran Dang Duong, members of CMC Telecom’s Data Analytics and Strategy Division, born in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

The team’s solution is an AI model capable of efficiently processing and analyzing dashcam videos to accurately identify complex traffic situations. From video clips lasting 5–15 seconds, the system can observe, understand context, and generate appropriate answers to the organizers’ queries. This approach demonstrates not only strong technical expertise but also a practical mindset in applying AI to real-world problems rather than limiting it to academic experimentation.

The entire solution was completed in approximately 20 days—from the announcement of the challenge to the final submission deadline. Within this short timeframe, the team had to handle large volumes of data, continuously optimize the model, and balance accuracy, processing speed, and generalization across diverse traffic scenarios.

Engineer Nhat Minh shared that at its current stage, RoadBuddy can function as a personal assistant for drivers, supporting post-trip information lookup in combination with traffic law data. More importantly, it serves as a foundation for further expansion into intelligent transportation scenarios, where AI can help humans make faster and more accurate decisions in real-world environments.

Nhat Minh also highly appreciated the value that Zalo AI Challenge brings to Vietnam’s young AI community, noting that the organizers provided a sufficiently large and well-standardized dataset. This enabled teams to focus on algorithm development and model performance optimization—the core factors for creating solutions with strong real-world potential.

For CMC Telecom, the achievement of the CtelAI team is a vivid testament to the company’s strategic investment in data, artificial intelligence, and people. As AI increasingly becomes the foundation of digital infrastructure and technology services, the ability of young engineers to master complex, application-driven AI challenges highlights the sustainable development potential of Vietnam’s technology workforce.

In the era of AI-fication, the true value of artificial intelligence lies not in the complexity of algorithms, but in the ability to transform data and technology into solutions that benefit society. This is the journey CMC Telecom continues to pursue steadily—by building long-term data and AI capabilities alongside a team of young engineers who are directly shaping the future of AI in Vietnam.