The Executive Hackathon is the format engineered to close it. One to two focused days. Small teams. Real challenges from your own organisation. The full toolkit of frontier AI on the laptop, with coding capability where the problem calls for it. By the close, what was an idea at breakfast is a working prototype on the table.
This is not a coding event. The point is what happens inside a leader's head when, between the morning of one day and the afternoon of the next, they go from looking at AI to building with it.
How a hackathon runs
A short kick-off framing the day and the room: nothing here is judged, the only thing that matters is what you learn and what you build.
A facilitated problem and idea collection. We deliberately do not ask for AI use cases. We ask what is stealing your time, what is annoying, where the missed opportunities are. Quantity over quality. We collect dozens of seeds.
Problem refinement and team formation. We cluster and sharpen the raw material into concrete, solvable problem statements. Teams form around the thematic clusters.
The build sprints. Build sprints of around 30 to 45 minutes, interleaved with shorter status rounds of around 10 to 15 minutes. In the status rounds the teams learn from each other in real time. Three to four cycles.
Live coaching throughout. Our facilitators move through the room, coaching, unblocking, holding the energy up.
Pitches and a vote in the room. No slide decks. Each team shares what it built, what it learned, what surprised them. The room votes.
Why building works
A learning turbo. Working on a real case under mild competitive pressure is the fastest way leadership learns. What the team builds with its own hands sits deeper than anything a talk could install.
Leaders as AI solution architects. Once a leader has built something themselves, the reflex to push every technical question to IT softens. Each function can do more in-house, and IT is freed for the harder AI questions that genuinely belong there.
Formats and flex points
The Hackathon flexes from a sharp half day with a small, already AI-literate leadership team to a full one and a half or two days with a wider leadership cohort.
Where the Hackathon is part of a wider engagement, it sits naturally as day two of the Executive AI Experience offsite.
What you walk away with
- Working prototypes on real organisational problems, the kind that can be carried into a wider rollout.
- A documented set of solutions and the thinking that produced them.
- A leadership cohort that has built with AI, not been told about it.
- A short post-event feedback loop, with the patterns and the gaps we saw across the room.
Who this is for
Executive committees who want a sharp, building-centred way into AI rather than another briefing. Broader leadership cohorts as part of a function or business-unit launch.
How it fits
The Hackathon works as a standalone or as the second day of the Executive AI Experience offsite. For teams still building AI literacy from scratch, the Executive Workshop is the step before. To carry what is built in the room into the wider organisation afterwards, the Enablement Retainer holds the rhythm.