The enthusiasm for Gen AI, ML, and AI agents is swelling among developers. Nowhere is the fervor more evident than in the high concentration of hackathons focused on AI app development.
A spate of big-name hacking events, such as Microsoft’s record-setting AI Agents 2025 hackathon, consistently draw large turnouts. In fact, AI is the top category among all themes for hackathons that are open to the public, according to leaderboards on Devpost.com, a leading hackathon platform, as of the time of this writing.
At the same time, internal hackathons are catching on among organizations who want to inject speed and innovation into the company using AI. Some of the organizations leveraging them include Hilton Hotels, Statsig, Uber, and the U.S. General Services Administration, to name a few.
Much like traditional hackathons, AI-themed hackathons are focused on rapid prototyping in a competitive setting to gain momentum on application development. The tight focus on problem-solving and hyper-accelerated timelines make them ideal for stimulating experimentation and ideation.
“It's all about the innovation that happens when people come together and start throwing ideas around,” said Luke Williams, a senior manager at Nutanix who oversees the company’s own long-running hackathon series. In addition to using AI apps to support various aspects of its business, Nutanix provides Nutanix Enterprise AI software that helps IT teams achieve positive business outcomes by delivering AI with enterprise-grade resiliency, day 2 operations, and security.
Build Customized AI Applications
Only with AI-themed competitions, the focus is on building solutions that do all the things that AI excels at. Things such as expanding business opportunities, eliminating inefficiencies from internal processes, and improving business outcomes.
As a result, hackathons are becoming an invaluable tool for organizations who are looking to accelerate AI app development. They can be used as an innovation strategy to spur the development of customer support apps, fraud detection, code generation, and more.
“As organizations become familiar with AI models and AI systems, they naturally feel more confident in their ability to go and build the solutions they would like to see,” said Williams. “But now there’s the gap of how do you get there?”
AI hackathons are increasingly part of the answer to bridging the gap. By giving organizations an arena to throw spaghetti against the wall, see what sticks, and move forward with the best solutions, hackathons are becoming a launchpad for creating Gen AI and agentic AI apps faster.
Establish an AI-first Mentality
Mature organizations with well-established, linear workflows risk falling behind untrammeled startups who use AI to drive growth at every turn.
“Most of the innovation is happening with the young startups, many of which spun out big tech and big companies in order to move faster,” said Blitzscaling Ventures’ General Partner of AI Investments Jeremiah Owyang told The Forecast. Owyang hosts an AI startup networking event and has been a judge at many prominent AI hackathons.
“It is amazing to see that [these small teams] can build global enterprise AI software in one year with rapid adoption … because they're using AI for everything,” he said. “They have exponential gains because they have an AI-first mentality. It's always about leveraging AI first.”
By contrast, predictable yet restrictive development models tend to stultify the speed of progress within mature organizations. By disrupting and accelerating the development cycle, hackathons help organizations rekindle a startup mindset.
“The energy you feel in the office is so high it’s palpable,” said Williams of Nutanix’s annual hackathon weeks. “Everybody's excited and fired up about what they're working on, which hearkens back to the old days. It's got that startup feel where everybody's frantically dashing around, really excited about their effort.”
AI was a standout at this year’s global hackathon event, with the AI category seeing the largest jump in submissions in recent memory. The most promising AI tools, processes, and product enhancements are fast-tracked for production—an example of how hackathons can instill startup-like leanness and agility within an existing development methodology.
Along with the knock-on effects that come along with internal hackathons—improved collaboration, employee engagement, talent retention—the format shines at identifying opportunities to address specific needs within the organization with customized AI solutions.
“As AI has trickled into our work lives, people are beginning to realize that the tasks and workflows they do are not effective, and can see a future where AI makes their life easier,” he said.
“They’re beginning to look at their pain points and say, ‘Hey, I think there really could be a solution here.’”
Move AI Apps into Production Faster
Coming to prominence in the late-2000s alongside the arrival of commercial app stores, hackathons have been instrumental in the advancement of enterprise and consumer-facing applications. Williams calls attention to how hackathons function as acceleration engines for innovation, pointing to numerous improvements that grew out of hackathon events.
“So many things to come out of the hackathon over the past eleven years have had a huge impact on our products and processes. You could go down a list and say that, without the hackathon, we wouldn't have this, we wouldn't have this, we wouldn't have this,” he said.
With the rise of Gen AI and AI agents, a wave of AI-themed hackathons are poised to do the same for AI app-building.
Recent hackathons put on by Nutanix demonstrate their tangible business value, having led to the creation of the SupportGPT, SalesGPT, and SeGPT apps. These apps generate value by improving productivity among customer support, the sales team, and Nutanix systems engineers, respectively.
For organizations looking to use hackathons as a launchpad, Williams stresses the importance of maintaining the same development process, tools, and environment from prototype to production. Typically, they will branch the repo so the hack isn’t happening against the master, then merge the branched code back if the project is selected to move forward with development after the event.
The process allows teams to rapidly shift from a hackathon-style development mode to a production development mode without major delays or hurdles. Hyperconverged infrastructure is a key ingredient, as it allows developers to maintain consistency across development and live environments and to streamline the provisioning of AI infrastructure, accelerating time to market for new AI applications.
“Demos for process improvements or tool enhancements usually can be done in a few weeks,” explained Williams. “Customer-facing products go through the regular QA and development processes and are ultimately integrated into the product.”
Bring Innovation to Scale
According to the most recent Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index survey, 85 percent of enterprises have a strategy in place for Gen AI development. But a significant 45 percent have yet to implement said strategy, or are still in the early stages of doing so. These organizations could benefit from including hackathons as part of their AI strategy.
Nutanix’s own internal hackathons provide a blueprint for how to bring innovation events to scale. They started out in rented hotel ballrooms with thirty or so engineers sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at a long table tangled with cables and networking equipment. They have since grown into principal events anticipated and attended by thousands of employees around the globe.
The Gen AI and Agentic Transformation category was a new addition last year, with the goal of improving productivity and evolving software systems using AI technologies. As the event continues to evolve, the AI angle could expand into a standalone event or opened to external vendors and partners to support and enhance external functions, said Williams.
“There are some opportunities in the future to create some really big pushes from an innovation perspective,” he said.
Jason Johnson is a contributing writer. He is a longtime content and copywriter for tech and tech-adjacent businesses. Find him on Linkedin.
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