Four Eras in Four Years: How the Winning Stack Kept Changing

In 2022 the winners ran on Whisper. InvestogAId transcribed trading videos, Moriarty flagged toxic speech, Butter supported people who stutter — all from a moment when turning speech into text was itself the novelty. 2023 moved to the ChatGPT API, and entries like ChattyRental and Cultivate won by putting a conversational interface onto a business process. 2024 lines up Databricks, Azure and RAG: the year of connecting to a company's existing data.

2025 changes the picture. Nine winners used ADK, five Qdrant, five GKE, four Agentforce — platform-hosted events proliferated and agent orchestration became the subject. Then in 2026 MCP leads with six winners, with Claude, Gemini and Copilot Studio at four each. The focus has shifted to the protocols connecting agents to each other and to tools.

Takeaway: copying an old winner does not work, because the novelty that carried it has expired. Read the structure instead — what was new that year. Right now the differentiator is less raw model quality than how you design the connections between agents and tools. Find out what the host company shipped recently and bet on that newness; it is the shortest path.