Accelerating AI Adoption Through Internal Hackathons: The 8x8 Success Story
Accelerating AI Adoption Through Internal Hackathons: The 8x8 Success Story
The Challenge: Scaling Up Their Use of AI
Like many enterprises, 8×8 faced a critical challenge: how to move beyond AI experimentation to real business impact. While the leadership team championed AI initiatives and technical teams explored possibilities, the gap between potential and production remained wide. The company needed a catalyst to:
- Democratize AI capabilities across non-technical teams
- Validate business use cases with measurable ROI
- Build organizational confidence in AI implementation
- Productizing AI agents for widescale internal use
The Solution: A Revenue-Focused AI Hackathon with Airia
Rather than a traditional hackathon with open-ended exploration, 8×8 implemented a structured, business-driven model along with the Airia team. The 8×8 team partnered the team from Airia to prepare, so the hackathon participants could hit the ground running. They validated business cases with department leaders, setup the technical infrastructure, and trained all participants on the platform. The close vendor partnership provided crucial expertise and mentorship during both preparation and the hackathon itself.
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Delivering Business Impact
Instead of starting from scratch, participants submitted 90 potential use cases, 20 of which were proposed to the 8x8 executive team, so they could work on pre-vetted ideas that business leaders actively wanted. This ensured every project had executive sponsorship and a clear path to production.
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Democratizing AI Development
Each team included business users, IT professionals, and AI specialists. This broke down the traditional barrier where "only engineers build tools." By providing a low-code AI platform like Airia, and proper support, non-technical staff became builders:
- Marketing teams created content automation tools
- Sales operations built RFP response systems
- Finance automated order desk workflows
- IT streamlined help desk operations -
Driving AI Adoption
The hackathon created 55 AI champions who are now teaching AI concepts in company-wide training, building their own departmental tools, and advocating for AI adoption in their teams. Multiple departments are requesting that the agents built in the hackathon are immediately deployed for their teams.
8×8’s hackathon goal of building agents for revenue generation and customer experience conveyed the importance their AI investment. This wasn’t about building cool tools. It was about driving business outcomes. In just three weeks, 8×8 transformed employee curiosity about AI into tangible business solutions. The innovative hackathon model demonstrates how partnering with your enterprise AI solution provider can drive organizational change.
By the Numbers
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680
employees attending weekly AI training sessions post-hackathon.
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12
production-ready applications built in three days.
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100 %
of projects moving to production implementation.
“The request from our business leaders was clear: ‘We want the things built in the hackathon extended and released.’ That’s reassuring validation that we built the right things.”