Andy Erickson & Aaron DeNu When you hear the word hackathon, a familiar image probably comes to mind: a room full of coders who are fueled by adrenaline and racing to build the best application. It’s a compelling model. In fact, the structure behind the hackathon concept—the focused collaboration, cross-functional energy, and bias toward real outputs—can be adapted to address almost any business challenge.
The format is far more flexible than most people assume. We’ve hosted similar events to solve various business challenges:
It’s no surprise that right now, the business challenges we hear most consistently from leaders involve AI—not whether to adopt it, but how to make it stick.
The organizations that are seeing meaningful results from implementing AI aren’t always the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They are organizations comprised of people who have genuinely changed how they think, collaborate, and make decisions because of AI-powered tools. Technology creates potential. Behavior is what converts that potential into performance.
Shifting from experimentation to embedded adoption requires intentional change at three levels:
Without attention to all three, AI investments tend to plateau. That’s the problem the AI-a-thon is designed to solve.
An AI-a-thon isn’t a training event or a tool demo. It’s a structured, facilitated experience that brings the right people together to work on real AI-focused challenges facing your business, and to do so in a way that begins building the habits and alignment your organization needs to sustain progress.
Participants don’t just learn about AI. They wrestle with it, and they experience real limitations around standard approaches for leveraging AI. This is intentional: When familiar approaches stop working, participants get curious and start to rethink how their AI habits need to change to produce stronger outcomes. This curiosity drives innovation. Teams leave with a shared language and tested assumptions that they built together through experimentation, not instruction.
For leaders at large, complex organizations, this team clarity and alignment set the foundation for effective human-AI collaboration. An AI-a-thon works best as a catalyst to move teams from disparate AI experimentation to leveraging AI in more strategic and collaborative ways—creating momentum that leaders can build on through ongoing reinforcement.
Is your organization focused on moving from AI experimentation to strategically leveraging AI to improve how people work, collaborate, and make decisions? Fill out the form below to schedule an AI-a-thon for your team.