What is a customer hackathon? A new approach to AI product adoption

Most AI products don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because customers never fully use them.

According to a recent MIT study, 95% of organizations report getting zero return from their investments in GenAI. It’s not because of the tools themselves. In many cases, it comes down to challenges integrating them into existing workflows.

Picture this: You launch a powerful new capability. You announce it in a release note. Maybe you even host a demo. And then… usage stays flat. Renewals get harder. Expansion conversations stall. The product risks becoming shelfware.

Customer hackathons are designed to solve this exact problem.

This post breaks down what a customer hackathon is, how it works, and why more product, sales, and customer teams are using them to drive measurable AI adoption.

What is a customer hackathon?

A customer hackathon is a company-hosted event where your customers build real projects using your product—usually over 1–2 days or over the course of a week.

Unlike internal hackathons (which are for employees) or public hackathons (which are open to anyone), customer hackathons are often run with existing accounts.

Here’s how customer hackathons differ from other types of company hackathons:

• Internal hackathons are hosted by companies for their own teams, with the goal of helping employees experiment, improve internal workflows, and increase efficiency using AI.
• Public hackathons are hosted to engage a broad developer audience, grow community, drive awareness of AI tools, and generate new use cases at scale.
• Customer hackathons are hosted specifically for customers, with the goal of driving deeper product adoption, retention, and expansion within existing accounts.

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Why run a customer hackathon?

Customer hackathons are designed to drive adoption of your AI tools by giving customers a focused environment to build, integrate, and ship with your platform. They also help eliminate the implementation gap—the space between signing a contract and seeing real value.

Many AI and product teams face the same challenges:

• Customers don’t know what’s possible with new AI features
• Adoption is shallow, making ROI hard to prove
• Low usage puts renewals and expansions at risk
• Dormant accounts are difficult to re-energize

A customer hackathon tackles these issues head-on by moving customers from understanding your product to actively using it.

For teams responsible for AI enterprise adoption, this matters. Adoption isn’t just about turning features on—it’s about embedding AI into real workflows. Hackathons create the conditions for this to happen quickly.

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What customer hackathons enable through hands-on building

Customer hackathons are powerful because they create dedicated time and space for customers to build with your product.

Build real workflows, not just ideas

Hands-on building helps customers:

• Discover capabilities they didn’t know existed
• Connect your AI to their own data, systems, and workflows
• Move from “interesting idea” to working prototype

This is especially relevant for teams facing AI adoption challenges. Many organizations stall because customers haven’t integrated new AI tools into their workflows. 

Hackathons remove the friction to help make this happen so participants can quickly start building meaningful solutions. This was the case in a hackathon that SAP ran:

“One of the participants was a lead developer from an international manufacturer. He had never touched the Business Technology Platform,” said Nico Wyss, Solutions Advisor at SAP. “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.”

Learn how customers actually want to use your AI

Customer hackathons create a direct feedback loop between your teams and your customers. Product, sales, and solutions teams can work alongside participants, training them on your platform, while also learning how customers want to use your AI in the real world.

Turn hands-on building into measurable outcomes

As a result:

• Time-to-value shrinks
• Your product becomes embedded into workflows and harder to replace
• Builders become internal advocates who can justify continued investment

This is where teams begin to clearly answer the question: “How do you measure the ROI of AI adoption?” 

In one customer hackathon run on Devpost, 80% of participants started with mid to low experience building AI agents. Within 24 hours, they built 26 working agents—half of them using the tools for the first time.

What exactly happens at a hackathon

Customer hackathons can be run entirely virtually, in person (often with the help of a hackathon platform), or as a hybrid event. Each hackathon is different, but most follow a simple structure:

1. Planning and registration: The organizer defines the theme, goals, timeline, and resources, then opens registration for customers.
   
   
2. Kickoff: The event begins with a kickoff announcement or session to set context, share guidelines, and spark ideas.
   
   
3. Hands-on building: This is the core of the event. Customers actively use your product to build projects, with optional support from product, sales, or solutions teams.
   
   
4. Project submission: Teams submit what they built by a set deadline—often through a platform that makes it easy to collect and showcase projects.
   
   
5. Demos and sharing: Participants present their projects. These sessions often include internal stakeholders from the customer’s organization, including leadership.
   
   
6. Judging: Submissions are reviewed, often by company or customer leadership, based on clear criteria.
   
   
7. Recognition and follow-up: Winners are celebrated, and high-potential projects are identified for further development. Follow-up often includes surveying participants to gather feedback and understand their experience building with the tool.
   
   

In just a short sprint, customers often accomplish what would otherwise take months of emails, demos, and meetings.

Common misconceptions about customer hackathons

Not all teams fully understand hackathons. Here are a few common misconceptions—and how to address them:

• “Hackathons are just for developers.” Customer hackathons often include product managers, analysts, and business leaders. The focus is solving real problems, not writing perfect code.
• “We won’t get anything production-ready.” The goal isn’t perfection—it’s momentum. Many teams use hackathon projects as the foundation for real deployments.
• “They’re just a fun marketing event.”When designed well, customer hackathons directly support adoption, retention, and revenue goals.

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Why customer hackathons matter now

Customers don’t churn because your AI isn’t impressive—they churn because it never becomes essential.

Customer hackathons give teams a practical way to change that. They turn engagement into implementation, creativity into commitment, and interest into measurable adoption.

Platforms like Devpost for Teams help make this repeatable and help sales and CS teams re-engage accounts by enabling customers to build, learn, and win with your AI.