The Executive Hackathon is the format built to close that gap. One to two focused days, small teams, real challenges from your own organisation, and the full toolkit of frontier AI on the laptop, with coding capability where the problem calls for it. By the end, 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, and teams form around whatever clusters come out of it.
The build sprints. Sessions of around 30 to 45 minutes, interleaved with shorter status rounds of around 10 to 15 minutes, three or four cycles in total. In the status rounds, the teams learn from each other in real time.
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 who can build it themselves. Once a leader has actually built something, the reflex to push every technical question over to IT softens. Each function ends up able to do more in-house, and IT gets freed up 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's actually built with AI, instead of just being 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'd rather build their way into AI than sit through 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.