Tangible Outcomes: How Our Annual AI Hackathon Drives Real Efficiency at Empowered Margins
Most hackathons end with a demo. Ours are built to ship. For the past two years, Empowered Margins has hosted an annual internal AI Hackathon with a straightforward mission: target everyday operational challenges and give cross-functional teams the dedicated space to solve them. We don’t start with shiny technology ideas; we start with the unpolished work itself. A process that takes too long. Data that requires manual reconciliation.
Disconnected systems. Or high-volume workflows that survived simply because fast-paced growth left little time to pause and optimize. These complex operational friction points aren’t unique to us—they exist across our clients’ entire enterprise ecosystems. Whether it’s managing complex databases in associations, navigating specialized environments like DataHub.Insure and Frisco, or unlocking high-value ideas trapped on backlogged roadmaps, the hackathon creates a fast track for solutions.
Breaking Down Silos: For a few days, organizational hierarchy vanishes. Interns pair with directors, engineers brainstorm with product managers, and client-facing teams bring front-line reality into technical execution. Before the hackathon begins, Product Managers bring forward real, unprioritized operational bottlenecks. Teams step in to automate repetitive processing, connect disparate systems, and remove technical friction that drains engineering bandwidth. The goal isn’t just automating a task; it’s rethinking why the task existed in the first place.
The Marketplace Pitch: Proving Real-World Value: This year, we introduced an internal Marketplace Pitch. Teams couldn’t just present slides or flash a quick prototype, they had to pitch their solution as a viable product to stakeholders and peers using investment tokens. That shifted the bar. Technical complexity meant nothing if it didn’t answer one core question: Will this actually make a measurable difference on Monday morning? The highest-voted projects don’t just win recognition—they get integrated into our active product and operational roadmaps.
Beyond the Prototype: The true measure of a hackathon isn’t a single day of presentations; it’s what survives months later. Did it eliminate manual overhead? Did it connect isolated systems? Did it give teams back hours of their week? Our annual AI Hackathon isn’t about chasing AI trends. It’s about building a culture where innovation turns directly into long-term operational efficiency.
| ⚡Scorecard: Is the solution still being used months later? Did it actually reduce manual work? Did it save time? Did it solve the problem it was built to solve? |
Running the hackathon annually allows us to take promising ideas from experimentation into implementation—and then measure their impact over time. Some ideas evolve. Some need to be rebuilt. Some reveal that the original problem was more complicated than expected. And some become permanent improvements in how we work. That’s the outcome we’re looking for. Our annual AI Hackathon creates an environment where people from across Empowered Margins can step outside their usual roles, challenge the way things are done, and experiment with better ways of working.
- To remove a frustrating manual process.
- To connect systems that weren’t working together.
- To give someone back hours of their week.
When an idea that started with a team asking “Can we make this better?” becomes something people rely on every day. That’s when experimentation becomes efficiency—and that’s what makes the hackathon more than just an annual event.
And this is where the real story begins.
See how each day of the AI Hackathon unfolds—from the challenges teams tackle to the ideas they bring to life.
Follow the journey on LinkedIn →