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How internal hackathons drive AI transformation
Transform your business in 2026 with internal AI hackathons.
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Real numbers from Devpost customers show what public, internal, and customer hackathons actually return on investment.
A hackathon's ROI depends on the type of hackathon you're running. For public hackathons, the return is developer community growth and projects built with your tools. For internal hackathons, it's production-ready prototypes, faster workflows, and internal skill-building. For customer hackathons, it's deeper product usage and stronger customer retention.
5% to 33% of hackathon registrants go on to submit a finished project. Traditional developer marketing tactics, like ads or sponsored content, typically convert at around 1%.
Here’s a deeper look at what hackathon ROI looks like for the organizations running these events.
Public hackathons are built to grow your developer community, generate projects built with your tools, and surface product feedback directly from the people using them. Devpost's public hackathon platform helps companies reach a community of 6M+ builders.
These results represent over a decade of hackathons for most of these companies. Developers who have participated in six or more hackathons ship AI projects to production at 2.2x the rate of first-timers, which is why the return on a public hackathon compounds the more your community comes back.
For internal or employee hackathons, ROI can be measured through new workflows built, production-ready prototypes developed, and the skills teams build through hands-on experimentation. The clearest sign of ROI is what happens to a project after the event ends.
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In Crusoe’s first internal hackathon, the top 30% of projects were confirmed for production, with leadership immediately asking when those projects would go live. Another 70% were far enough along that they were added to the product roadmap. Notably, 73% of participants had never used Crusoe's own core product before the event, but their projects still hit production quality. "[Crusoe executives] keep asking when the projects are going to be put into production," said Emmanuel Acheampong, Developer Relations Manager at Crusoe.
Candescent saw the same kind of follow-through in its first company-wide hackathon, where over 460 employees formed more than 120 teams and submitted 120 projects in 48 hours. "That means nearly every team that formed submitted a project, which is a strong indicator of commitment and follow-through," said the Candescent hackathon team. The results were strong enough that leadership approved a recurring quarterly program.
"One of the clearest indicators of success was that many projects continued beyond the event itself," said Satheesh Ravala, Chief Technology Officer at Candescent.
Grafana Labs sees a similar pattern: about a quarter of its hackathon projects ship, with another 10% to 15% reaching the roadmap, according to Global Internal Events Manager Juan Ruszem.
Many organizers measure hackathon ROI by what happens to projects after the event ends. At Toyota, that's been the focus from the start. "Post-hackathon, we don't want it to stop there. Executives are instrumental in terms of finding pathways to productionalizing these things, and that's critical," said Trey Spyropoulos, Manager, Communications & Organizational Effectiveness at Toyota.
At Valenz Health, more than half of all project submissions had immediate production capacity, a result VP of Innovation David Green said he'd be comfortable presenting directly to an executive.
Participation is one of the easiest hackathon outcomes to measure, and one of the clearest signs of program health.
JLL and Okta both saw employee participation climb by as much as 50% after adopting Devpost for Teams, and Okta cut its organizers' manual workload to roughly a quarter of what it used to be, according to Director of Innovation Programs Neta Retter.
Motorola Solutions counted more than 11,000 people across hackers, judges, and voters in a single all-hands hackathon, by letting people join for two days, two hours, or twenty minutes depending on how involved they wanted to be.
Customer hackathons put your own product directly in your customers' hands. The goal is moving past surface-level usage: faster time-to-value, customers who become internal advocates for your tool, and workflow integration deep enough that your product becomes a dependency, not just another vendor. The ROI for customer hackathons ultimately comes down to what customers do with your product once the event is over.
Neo4j runs 72-hour "Graphathons" that bring 30 to 40 customer team members together with its own engineers and trainers to turn unfunded ideas into working prototypes.
"Every hackathon we've done so far has resulted in the majority of the use cases we've worked on being funded post-event. For us, that's a tremendous outcome." — Vincent Mayers, Senior Community Manager at Neo4j
The model has worked well enough that Neo4j is scaling from one hackathon a month to two or three.
SAP uses customer hackathons to show its clients how to build customized solutions with its Business Technology Platform. "The hackathons are designed to enable customers to directly leverage SAP's technology stack," said Nico Wyss, Solutions Advisor at SAP. "Not only do customers get to know that technology, but we also get a better understanding of their challenges."
In one hackathon, a lead developer from an international manufacturer had never touched BTP before the event. "At the end of the four days, he had such an experience that they actually implemented more use cases after the hackathon with the tools delivered by the BTP," said Nico.
The metrics above break down into a few consistent categories: how many people participated, what percentage submitted a finished project, what percentage of those projects shipped or moved to production, and what happened after the event ended. For a full framework on tracking these for your own hackathon, see our guide to measuring the success of your internal innovation hackathon.
The right next step depends on which hackathon you're planning. If you're planning a public hackathon, our guide to running a hackathon program covers what to plan for. If you're pitching an internal hackathon to leadership, our guide to building executive buy-in has templates for the pitch. If you're weighing a customer hackathon, see how customer hackathons drive AI adoption.
