How Salesforce drives developer innovation with hackathons on Devpost

Salesforce has an impressive history of fuelling innovation through hackathons on Devpost—running open competitions that welcome developers worldwide and exclusive hackathons for attendees of its major conferences. 

From more than 7,000 developers building AI agents in a single hackathon, to a first-place winner who turned their hackathon project into a startup, to a challenge around creating agents that drive meaningful social impact—these events have consistently inspired developers to build solutions that matter. 

Take a closer look at Salesforce's hackathons on Devpost to see how these competitions spark creativity, foster a sense of community among developers, and inspire new solutions.

Summary

Since 2018, Salesforce has run hackathons on Devpost across two tracks: open competitions that welcome developers worldwide, and exclusive hackathons for attendees of its major conferences, including Dreamforce and TDX—powered by Devpost for Teams. 

Across three brands—Salesforce, Salesforce Tableau, and Slack—these events have engaged more than 19,000 developers in Salesforce's open hackathons alone, challenging participants to build new applications and solutions using Salesforce technologies.

Open hackathon themes and objectives

Salesforce's public hackathons on Devpost have covered a wide range of themes and objectives. Common themes include:

Agentic AI: Salesforce has used hackathons to put its AI tools directly in developers' hands, challenging them to build autonomous agents and intelligent solutions for real-world business problems. These competitions drive hands-on experimentation with technologies like Agentforce—and the results speak for themselves: hundreds of agents have been built using Salesforce technologies through these competitions alone.

Data and analytics: Hackathons centered on data have challenged developers to build solutions that surface meaningful insights and put analytics in the flow of work. Using tools like the Tableau portfolio, participants explore new ways to visualize data, extend analytics capabilities through APIs and integrations, and help organizations make faster, smarter decisions.

Collaboration and workplace productivity: These hackathons challenge developers to build apps and workflows—including those built on platforms like Slack—that improve the way teams work, from automating repetitive tasks to streamlining cross-functional communication. The goal: make work simpler, more connected, and more productive.

Real-world business solutions: Salesforce's hackathons invite developers to build on the Salesforce platform, using tools like Salesforce Flow and Apex, to create solutions that tackle real business problems across sales, service, IT, and operations. These hackathons allow participants to dig into capabilities they may not have tried before and showcase the breadth and flexibility of Salesforce's tools.

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Featured hackathons and highlights

With so many great Salesforce hackathons to choose from, here’s a selection that showcases the range and impact of Salesforce hackathons on Devpost:

Open hackathons on Devpost

These hackathons drew participants from around the world to build with Salesforce technologies.

Agentforce Virtual Hackathon

Details: This hackathon invited participants to build AI agents on Agentforce—Salesforce's platform for deploying autonomous AI agents—using Agent Builder and a series of custom actions to solve a real business problem. Developers were given access to dedicated Salesforce orgs to build and submit working agents, which could be employee-facing or customer- and partner-facing. The hackathon featured $140,000 in prizes, including a $50,000 grand prize.

Highlights: Over 7,000 developers joined the Agentforce Virtual Hackathon, making it one of the largest Salesforce hackathons on Devpost to date. The grand prize went to Call Prep Agent, an agent built on Agentforce for employees that helps professionals prepare for meetings by automatically researching attendees—gathering bios, LinkedIn profiles, web research, and Salesforce interaction logs—then compiling everything into a briefing document in Google Docs.

"We're particularly proud of the rich text UI we were able to render inside the Agentforce chat panel. We'd love to polish it up and get it onto AgentExchange." — Grand Prize-winning team, Agentforce Virtual Hackathon

Tableau Hackathon

Details: This hackathon challenged participants to build with the Tableau portfolio to solve a real-world business problem. Developers could build using Tableau Next—Tableau's next-generation platform built directly on the Salesforce platform—or by leveraging the Tableau Cloud Developer Platform and its APIs. The hackathon featured $45,000+ in prizes.

Highlights: Over 2,200 participants competed to build the future of analytics. The grand prize went to DashAgent: AI BI Analyst, a tool that connects to Tableau as both an Extension and an MCP server, giving any dashboard a built-in AI second opinion. DashAgent surfaces blind spots to help users validate what a dashboard is saying, spot potential errors or missing context, and surface insights people might otherwise miss—and works in both Tableau and VS Code. 

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Digital HQ Slackathon

Details: This hackathon challenged participants to build a new Slack app or workflow that boosts productivity, communication, and connection for their team or organization. Projects competed across seven category tracks spanning the full enterprise: Sales; Service & Frontline; Engineering & Product; IT & Operations; Marketing & Design; HR, Finance, Legal & Corporate Functions; and the Digital HQ as a whole. The hackathon featured $47,000 in prizes, with first place earning $15,000, a meeting with Slack leadership, and implementation or go-to-market support.

Highlights: First place went to Get Together, an AI-powered scheduling app that lets teams schedule meetings directly inside a Slack conversation—no toggling between apps required. Get Together triangulates message context, calendar availability, and individual user preferences to find the best time for a group, then places the event on each attendee's calendar automatically. The team was so energized by the response that they planned to make Get Together their startup's primary focus.

"Coming out of the Slackathon, we are going to make Get Together in Slack the dominant focus for our startup." — First place winner, Digital HQ Slackathon

Exclusive conference hackathons

Salesforce also brings hackathons to its biggest events of the year. Powered by Devpost for Teams, these exclusive competitions are open to conference registrants—giving Salesforce developers, administrators, and architects a hands-on opportunity to push their knowledge of Salesforce tools and collaborate with fellow builders in real time. 

A highlight of each event: finalists demo their projects live, with winner announcements that bring the energy and creativity of the builds to the conference floor.

TDX 2026 Hackathon

Details: The TDX 2026 Hackathon brought together developers, administrators, and architects to build creative solutions on the Agentforce 360 Platform. Open to TDX 2026 attendees, participants built and submitted their projects before the conference, with finalists selected to demo their projects live at the TDX conference. The hackathon featured a $50,000 grand prize, with entries judged on creativity, real-world relevance, platform capabilities, and delivery.

‍Highlights: Finalists took to the stage at TDX for a live hackathon showdown—one of the most anticipated moments of the conference program. The grand prize went to “City Pulse Agent,” a solution that transforms city infrastructure management from a reactive complaint system into a proactive, intelligent command center. Using Agentforce and Tableau, City Pulse tracks citizen 311 complaints, identifies the root causes of recurring infrastructure failures, and automatically dispatches field service teams via Slack—then closes the loop by texting local residents with real-time updates on street closures and issue resolutions.

Tableau Conference 2026 Hackathon

Details: Open to Tableau Conference 2026 attendees, the hackathon challenged builders to push the boundaries of analytics using the Tableau portfolio—creating integrations, automations, and extensions that redefine what's possible with data.

Highlights: Finalist teams got to pitch their solutions live to judges at Tableau Conference 2026 in San Diego. The hackathon participants raised the bar and delivered solutions with immediate, real-world impact. The winning project was a suite of six AI-powered tools that make Tableau accessible to everyone, submitted by Tristan Guillevin.

Dreamforce Hackathon: Build the future with Agentforce and Slack

Details: Held alongside Dreamforce 2025, this hackathon invited conference attendees to reimagine Salesforce user experiences by bringing humans and agents together inside Slack. Under the theme "Build the future with Agentforce and Slack," participants were challenged to create rich conversational applications that unlock new levels of productivity—with conversations serving as the new user interface for business. The hackathon was open to Dreamforce 2025 attendees and featured a $100,000 grand prize.

‍Highlights: The grand prize went to “Team Vector Studios,” whose solution transformed how creative teams work by consolidating planning, approvals, publishing, and analytics into a single, streamlined Slack workspace. Backed by Salesforce data and enhanced with Block Kit, CMS integrations, and interactive canvases, their project took creative teams from idea to launch—all inside Slack.

Agents for Good Hackathon

Details: The Agents for Good Hackathon invited Dreamforce attendees to build responsible AI solutions that promote accessibility, inclusion, and equality. Under the theme "AI for All: Technology that Empowers Everyone," participants used Agentforce's Agent Builder to create agents that address real-world challenges related to trust, fairness, and inclusion—demonstrating how agentic AI can drive meaningful social impact.

Takeaway

Salesforce's years of hackathons on Devpost, including open competitions and exclusive conference events, demonstrate the sustained value of putting new technologies in developers' hands and challenging them to build. With more than 19,000 developers engaged across its open hackathons, hundreds of agents built using Salesforce technologies, and live finalist showcases at Dreamforce, TDX, and Tableau Conference, these events have driven real innovation across the Salesforce ecosystem. And for many participants, the hackathon is just the beginning.

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