Don’t let your AI tool become shelfware: Use customer hackathons to drive measurable adoption

In the world of AI and high-growth software, the greatest threat isn't just a new competitor; it’s shelfware. Simply put, shelfware is software that a company has purchased but never actually uses—or uses so sparingly that it provides limited measurable value.

It starts with a nagging realization that your customers are only scratching the surface of your platform. A McKinsey survey highlights why this is happening: while nearly all organizations are using AI, most are stuck in the "experimentation or piloting" phase. In fact, nearly two-thirds of organizations have not yet begun scaling AI across their enterprise.

When an AI tool is stuck in a perpetual pilot, it’s the first thing to go during budget cuts. You need to bridge the gap between "having the tool" and "scaling the tool." A customer hackathon is an actionable way to move users past the login screen and into an environment where they use your full feature set to solve real business problems.

Measuring success: ROI indicators that matter

If you haven't run a hackathon before, you might worry about how to justify the spend to your leadership. The key is to focus on the indicators that signal a healthy, sticky account.

McKinsey reports that while many organizations see cost and revenue benefits from specific AI use cases, only 39% can attribute any level of enterprise-wide EBIT impact to AI. This highlights a critical value gap: customers are seeing success in small pockets, but they are struggling to connect your tool to their broader bottom line. A hackathon helps bridge this gap by accelerating those specific, high-value use cases.

Here’s how you can use Devpost for Teams (DFT) to capture this data and prove your tool is moving off the shelf and into production.

#1 Expertise growth: Bridging the skills gap

Among our customers, we’ve found that two of the biggest barriers to adoption are a lack of time to integrate a tool into existing workflows and a lack of familiarity with advanced features. 

Hackathons are uniquely valuable because they give participants the space to experiment and discover exactly how your AI tool fits into their specific, day-to-day processes. If a customer doesn’t feel like an expert in your tool, they likely won't feel comfortable making it a permanent part of their workflow.

• How to measure it: Within DFT, use custom registration questions—specific fields participants fill out when they sign up—to establish a baseline of their current AI skill levels and feature usage.
• The ROI link: After the event, use built-in post-hackathon surveys to measure the growth. When a user moves from "unaware of our API" to "built a functional prototype," you’ve successfully de-risked that seat. You are proving that the time invested in the hackathon resulted in a team that is now technically capable of implementing your tool.

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#2 Project viability: Moving from prototype to production

In a customer hackathon, the goal is viability. You want to see use cases that are sticky enough to be implemented in the next sprint. Naturally, these insights are most powerful when the hackathon is centered specifically on building with your product.

• How to measure it: Using DFT, you can require participants to assign specific categories to their projects (e.g., "Internal Efficiency"), making it easy to filter for the most relevant ideas. You can also use custom submission questions to have builders explain their project's impact. Asking "Describe the current workflow your project improves. How is it better with your solution?" helps you understand exactly how customers are applying your product to their unique challenges.
• The ROI link: McKinsey finds that "AI high performers"—those seeing the most significant bottom-line impact—are those that push for transformative innovation. By giving your customers a dedicated space to build with your tool, you move closer to that transformative value. If a customer automates a task they previously did manually, you become the engine behind a custom solution.

Read the case study: See how SAP uses hackathons to help its customers uncover and implement new use cases for its platforms.

#3 Product advocacy: Identifying power users via the Project Gallery

Every renewal conversation needs an internal advocate. Hackathons act as a natural filter to find these super-users. With 62% of organizations already experimenting with AI agents, the hunger for sophisticated use cases is there—they just need the right venue to build them.

• How to measure it: DFT’s project gallery remains available after the hackathon. This creates a permanent knowledge base for your product teams to see exactly how customers are using your tools. It also gives participants a central hub to store all their project info and documentation so they can keep building long after the event ends.
• The ROI link: This visibility is crucial for identifying your true product champions. Your Sales team can walk into a renewal meeting with a list of users who have built and documented a working solution on your platform.

Use hackathons to secure executive buy-in

The ultimate goal of a customer hackathon is to influence the decision to keep using your products. This is where it helps to get senior leadership involved.

Leaders are a natural fit to be hackathon judges, which gives them a front-row seat to exactly what is being built with your platform. Because these are often the most senior stakeholders in an account, it’s crucial they have a positive, professional experience.

DFT enables this through its streamlined judging features. This allows judges to focus on what really matters: the impact of the projects themselves. When an executive sees a project solve a real pain point using your product, your platform becomes a necessity.

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Drive adoption through direct technical support

Customer hackathons are one of the most effective sales and CS tools because they provide a rare opportunity for your product and engineering teams to work directly with your customers.

Your team can help participants build highly customized use cases. This hands-on collaboration ensures that the solutions built during the hackathon are technically sound and ready for real-world use. 

This moves the needle on two key goals:

• Activation: Participants use advanced features for the first time because they have an expert guiding them.
• Retention: By the end of the event, customers have built something to solve a specific problem, making them far more likely to integrate your tool into their daily work.

Building your long-term AI adoption strategy

Nudge emails and slide decks can only go so far in fighting shelfware. To move the needle on retention, you have to give your customers the time and the technical support to build something they actually need.

Devpost for Teams provides the structure to turn this into a long-term adoption strategy, giving you the data required to prove value at every level of the account.

Ready to drive deeper AI adoption? Talk to our team to see how customer hackathons can secure your next renewal.