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The Indian AI Olympiad · INAIO

Grow up ready for an AI-first world.

The Indian National AI Olympiad invites students in Classes 9 to 12 to reason about data, models and algorithms the way real AI engineers do — and it is the road to the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence. Here is everything your family needs to know, and how to begin.

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Who
Classes 9–12
Organised by
ACM India
First round
Online test
Leads to
IOAI

Why take part

The preparation is the prize. Every participant comes out ahead.

You don’t need to be a future champion to gain from the Olympiad. Preparing for it — and sitting the paper — builds the kind of thinking an AI-first world rewards.

Sharper thinking

Olympiad problems give you an unfamiliar idea, then ask you to reason with it. That habit — read carefully, test, justify — carries into every subject.

AI, beyond the hype

You learn what models really do: how they learn from data, how they are measured, and where they quietly go wrong.

Maths with a purpose

Probability, statistics, algebra and matrices stop being chapters and become tools for answering real questions.

Coding confidence

From reading simple programs to training models in Python notebooks — skills that compound long after the Olympiad.

A goal for the year

A date on the calendar turns curiosity into a plan: steady weekly practice with a clear finish line.

AI, built responsibly

You see how AI is built and evaluated — data quality, trade-offs between errors, honest metrics — and why those choices matter to people.

A community of peers

You join students across India working on the same ideas — people who enjoy a hard problem as much as you do.

A signal of initiative

Choosing to take on a national olympiad says something: that you are curious, self-driven and willing to stretch.

Ready for what comes next

Whatever you go on to study, understanding how AI works lets you use it thoughtfully — and build with it.

Beyond Stage 1

Every stage opens another door.

Students who progress go deeper into real, hands-on AI — and some go on to represent India on the world stage.

  1. 02

    Stage 2

    Hands-on AI

    Real datasets, Python notebooks and modelling problems — with an AI assistant allowed in select sections, as at IOAI.

  2. 03

    Stage 3

    Coaching from the organisers

    Selected students receive online coaching and are evaluated on more advanced material.

  3. 04

    Stage 4

    The national training camp

    An in-person camp at IIIT Hyderabad: intensive learning, assessments and a technical interview, alongside India’s strongest young AI students.

  4. 05

    Stage 5

    Representing India

    The final team prepares together and travels to the International Olympiad in AI with experienced team leaders. India has sent eight students to each of the last two IOAIs.

University applications

Selection stages and international experience make a distinctive profile. The organisers note that NTU Singapore and MBZUAI give special consideration to IOAI medallists and India’s IOAI representatives.

Research and internships

According to the organisers, several 2025 qualifiers received research internship offers from AI start-ups and IIIT Hyderabad.

Mentors for life

Camp faculty, team leaders and fellow finalists — a network that stays with you well beyond the competition.

Recognition

National and international recognition, with scholarships highlighted by the organisers among the opportunities that can follow.

Team India at IOAI

2025 · Beijing

3 gold · 2 silver · 1 bronze

India’s debut — 3rd on the medal table

2026 · Astana

1 gold · 5 silver · 1 bronze

Plus an honourable mention

Results as reported by the organisers on inaio.in.

The competition, explained

What INAIO is, and how it works.

The Indian National AI Olympiad is organised by ACM India in partnership with ACM IKDD. It builds AI readiness among school students and selects the team that represents India at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI). The format is still evolving, so treat inaio.in as the final word.

What it is

A national olympiad in AI for school students, run in stages from an online test to an in-person camp.

Who can enter

Indian citizens studying in India in Classes 9–12, from any board. For INAIO 2027: born after 1 July 2007.

When

Each cycle runs over the school year — Stage 1 in recent editions has been in December or January.

Where it leads

IOAI, the international olympiad in AI for high-school students. IOAI 2027 is in Singapore.

INAIO 2027

The stages, at a glance.

Dates as published on inaio.in in October 2026. They can change — always confirm on the official site.

  1. Stage 1Stage 1

    13 Dec 2026 · 10 am–12 pm

    Online proctored test, objective questions only

    No AI assistants

  2. Stage 2Stage 2

    24 Jan 2027

    Online proctored test: objective questions, long-form problems and hands-on modelling

    AI assistant in select sections

  3. Stage 3

    Mar / Apr 2027

    Online coaching and evaluation

    AI assistant in select sections

  4. Stage 4

    May 2027

    In-person national training camp at IIIT Hyderabad, with assessments and a technical interview

    AI assistant in select sections

  5. Stage 5

    Jun 2027

    Preparation of the team that represents India

  6. IOAI 2027

    4–10 Jul 2027 · Singapore

    The International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence

Stage 1

Inside a Stage 1 paper

  • An online, proctored test with objective questions only — the INAIO 2027 listing gives a two-hour slot, and no AI assistants are allowed.
  • In recent papers, short problems arrive as stories — a puzzle, a fraud filter, a pricing decision — with up to six options or an integer answer such as “report ⌊100p⌋”.
  • Longer multi-part problems define an idea inside the question — ranking metrics, a classifier, a recurrence — then ask you to apply it step by step.

Try one · in the Stage 1 style

~2 min

Monsoon alert. A model warns of heavy rain on 50 days of the season. On 40 of those days it really does pour; it also misses 10 heavy-rain days completely. Recall is the share of all heavy-rain days the model caught.

What is its recall? Report ⌊100 × recall⌋.

Show the answer

80. There were 40 + 10 = 50 heavy-rain days and the model caught 40, so recall = 40 ÷ 50 = 0.8. (Its precision happens to be 40 ÷ 50 too — a different question.)

Stage 2

Inside Stage 2

  • An online, proctored test mixing objective questions, long-form problems and hands-on modelling.
  • In recent editions it has had a theory part and a coding part: you receive a Python notebook and a dataset and build, train and evaluate a model.
  • A specified AI assistant is allowed in select sections — using it well is part of the skill. Working Python is essential from here.

Syllabus

What you’ll need to know.

A summary of the official stage-wise syllabus. Problems may go beyond it, giving you what you need inside the question.

Stage 1
  • Computational and logical thinking: patterns, rule discovery, puzzles, basic programming constructs
  • Algebra: functions, polynomials and quadratics, series and summations, AM-GM and Jensen’s inequalities
  • Probability and Bayes’ theorem; descriptive statistics, correlation and causation
  • Matrices and linear systems; linear optimisation with constraints, maxima and minima
  • Data representation: base-n coding, tables, graphs and charts
  • ML foundations and metrics — RMSE, MAE, precision, recall, F1, ROC and AUC — with definitions given in the question
  • Algorithms explained in the problem: regression, k-NN, decision trees, k-means, PCA, Naive Bayes, PageRank, TF-IDF
Stage 2
  • Everything in Stage 1, with determinants, overfitting, underfitting and hyperparameter tuning added
  • NLP, computer vision and multimodal basics: preprocessing, embeddings, pretrained encoders, common tasks
  • Python: loops, functions, files, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib and Seaborn
  • scikit-learn: training, testing and evaluating models on provided datasets
  • Using an AI assistant well: prompting for data work and code, chain-of-thought, in-context learning, retrieval augmentation

Later stages follow the IOAI syllabus, including deep learning with PyTorch. Full details: inaio.in/resources.

The story so far

A young olympiad, growing fast.

  1. 2024

    The first IOAI, in Burgas, Bulgaria

    The International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence began in August 2024, with teams of four students tackling a scientific round (machine learning, NLP and computer vision tasks) and a practical round using AI tools creatively.

  2. 2024–25

    INAIO’s first edition

    ACM India ran the first Indian National AI Olympiad: a Stage 1 test, a Stage 2 with theory and hands-on coding tasks, a third stage, then a national training camp for 20 students at IIIT Hyderabad, concluding in June 2025.

  3. 2025

    India’s IOAI debut, in Beijing

    Eight students, in two teams of four, represented India at the second IOAI. The team won 3 gold, 2 silver and 1 bronze medal plus an honourable mention, and India placed third on the medal table.

  4. 2025–26

    INAIO’s second edition

    Stage 1 was held online in January 2026, followed by a Stage 2 in two parts — theory, and coding with notebooks and datasets — online coaching, and the camp at IIIT Hyderabad. Eight students went on to IOAI 2026 in Astana, Kazakhstan, winning 1 gold, 5 silver and 1 bronze medal plus an honourable mention.

  5. 2026–27

    INAIO 2027 is under way

    The third edition has brought Stage 1 forward to December, on the road to IOAI 2027 in Singapore.

Questions families ask

The details, answered.

Rules are set by the organisers and can change between editions. When in doubt, the official site wins.

Official registration Syllabus and past papers Official INAIO FAQs

How ProofNPixel AI prepares you

Two programmes, mapped to the stages.

Base Camp builds the maths, coding and AI foundations from scratch. Summit trains you for INAIO Stage 1 and Stage 2, the way the Olympiad tests you.

Take the Prep Test See the programmes
Year 1 · Foundations

Base Camp12 units

Build the maths, coding and AI foundations the Olympiad stands on.

  • Think like a problem-solver4
  • Talk to computers2
  • Meet AI3
  • Bridge to the Olympiad3Stage 1

Ends with a bridge to the Olympiad: units 10–12 introduce Stage 1-style problems.

See the units
Year 2 · Olympiad preparation

Summit12 units

Train for INAIO Stage 1 and Stage 2, the way the Olympiad tests you.

  • Foundations4Stage 1
  • Computation & ML4Stage 1
  • Hands-on AI3Stage 2
  • Exam sprint1

Stage 1: units 1–8. Stage 2: units 9–11. Then the Exam sprint — timed papers with case studies.

See the units

AI Prep Test

20 questions in 30 minutes across reasoning, Python, ML and responsible AI. Free, with every answer explained and a recommended starting point.

Mock papers

Mini mocks (10 questions, 20 min) and full papers (90 min, with 3 multi-part case studies) in the Stage 1 style.

20 concept simulators

Poke decision trees, gradient descent, ROC curves and PageRank until the idea clicks.

Topic drills

5 questions in 5 minutes on one topic — Olympiad practice that fits on a bus ride.

Start free. The AI Prep Test, every concept simulator and the first unit of each programme are open to everyone. Full plans are coming soon.

See plans

Start with thirty minutes. See where it takes you.

Take the free AI Prep Test to see where you stand today, then practise towards the Olympiad one step at a time.

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