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How to drive adoption through hackathons across your developer communities, employees, and customers.
Integrating AI tools and platforms into daily workflows is a major goal for many companies in 2026. Whether the focus is on developer communities, internal employees, or enterprise customers, the objective is the same: move beyond theoretical AI knowledge and start seeing it used in practice.
However, a common challenge remains. Watching a demo or reading documentation is helpful for learning what a tool can do, but it rarely sparks the momentum needed to change how people actually work. Knowledge alone doesn't always lead to AI tool adoption.
Hackathons help clear this hurdle by providing the time and space for people to experiment and build. This hands-on approach looks different depending on the audience:
Whether you’re reaching out to a global developer community, your own employees, or your enterprise customers, a hackathon creates a dedicated space for people to build with AI.
By categorizing these efforts into three distinct "plays," you can align your hackathon strategy with your specific business goals and provide the right environment for your target audience to succeed.
The pain point: Developers are often eager to work with the latest AI tools, but they can face barriers to entry, such as a lack of access to the specific software or a lack of incentive to prioritize experimentation over existing projects.
The hackathon bridge: Public hackathons solve this by providing access to tools and a reason to build. Instead of just experimenting in a vacuum, participants get the chance to work on projects they find personally interesting while competing for recognition or prizes. This shifts the experience from passive testing to active creation, giving developers a platform to prove the tool's value to themselves and their peers.
The outcome: You move beyond one-way promotion and gain a gallery full of community-built projects that demonstrate what your tool or platform can do. This creates a library of social proof that can be used in future marketing.
The pain point: For developers, identifying which of their daily tasks could be improved by AI is not usually an issue. The challenge is implementation. Experimentation is time-consuming, and integrating new tools into complex internal workflows is complicated. Under the pressure of standard sprint cycles, even the best ideas for AI implementation can get pushed to the back burner.
The hackathon bridge: Internal hackathons provide a dedicated environment for experimentation that is officially sanctioned by leadership. They allow cross-functional teams to step away from the pressure of the normal work week to build with AI and tackle those integration hurdles together in a collaborative setting.
The outcome: You help your workforce become AI fluent while solving specific internal challenges. These events result in validated internal proofs-of-concept and a culture where employees can integrate AI into their daily roles, leading to long-term productivity gains.
The pain point: Your enterprise customers have the seats and licenses, but the tool isn't part of their daily routine yet. If they don't find a deep, recurring use case for the tool, they are less likely to renew or expand their contract.
The hackathon bridge: Private customer hackathons act as a collaborative workshop. Customers get the time and space to apply your AI tools to their own business data and unique problems. During these events, you can bring in your product experts to offer technical support and guidance, helping customers clear any implementation hurdles in real time.
The outcome: By building their own solutions, customers create a custom workflow that solves a real business need. This makes your tool a core part of their operations, which leads to stronger relationships and account growth.
Hackathons are not a one-size-fits-all solution. The way you structure the event and the metrics you track will change depending on your specific goal.
To help you get started, we created a guide that covers these details for each of these three audiences. It includes everything from ideas for hackathon themes to the specific ways you can measure outcomes and results.
