The point of this playbook
A tightly scoped event that produces evidence, not a day of disconnected experiments.
01
Three weeks before
Set the boundaries before you invite anyone. The strongest hackathons start with a small number of real workflows and a clear definition of a useful demo.
- Name one accountable sponsor and one person running the room.
- Collect six to ten workflow problems, then select three to five.
- Confirm approved tools, data boundaries, and what must never enter a model.
- Form teams of three to five with a workflow owner on each team.
02
The run of show
Keep instruction short and protect the building time. Teams learn more from working on one real problem than from another hour of AI demonstrations.
- 09:00, Context, rules, and the definition of a useful demo.
- 09:30, Teams map the current workflow and choose one bottleneck.
- 10:15, Build sprint one, followed by a ten-minute checkpoint.
- 12:00, Lunch and cross-team critique.
- 13:00, Build sprint two with evidence capture.
- 15:15, Five-minute demos: problem, new workflow, evidence, next risk.
- 16:15, Decide what advances, what stops, and who owns the next step.
03
Demo rules
A polished prototype can hide a weak idea. Make every team show enough of the underlying work to support a decision.
- Show the original workflow before showing the AI-assisted version.
- Use a real example or a realistic sanitized example.
- State where human review remains and why.
- Report one baseline measure and the observed change.
- End with a specific request: stop, test again, or move into a pilot.
04
The next morning
Momentum disappears when nobody converts the day into owned work. Send a one-page decision record within twenty-four hours.
- Record the decision and evidence for every demo.
- Give advancing experiments an owner, a deadline, and a review point.
- Capture reusable prompts, process changes, and failure modes.
- Schedule the first pilot review before the event fades from memory.