EffectiveSoft held its first hackathon on December 6–9, with Generative AI in the limelight. Initiated by our CTO Mark Minehart, the event allowed employees to actively engage with AI and explore its impact on business and technology.
Regardless of their role, any company employee had an opportunity to take part in the event. Tools requiring little to no coding allowed participants from non-technical departments like HR, Finance, Sales, and Marketing to contribute meaningfully alongside their more tech-savvy colleagues.
Why Generative AI?
Generative AI is becoming a game-changer across industries, helping businesses automate processes, improve decision-making, and unlock new growth opportunities. By exploring the capabilities of generative AI, we can learn how this technology can contribute to the success of our clients and apply it in practice.
This hackathon was a chance for everyone to jump in, learn, and prepare for the future in a practical, low-risk environment. The event also helped the team build lasting relationships, and frankly was a lot of fun!
Mark Minehart
Chief Technology Officer
Projects and results
The hackathon brought together five teams, each tasked with identifying real-world challenges and devising practical solutions using Generative AI.
Sales call analysis tool
This project’s goal is to improve the effectiveness of sales calls by analyzing proposal presentation transcripts. The team utilized Generative AI models, including ChatGPT and Claude, to evaluate transcripts and produce meeting summaries, performance ratings, and actionable follow-ups. This project showcased the importance of structured prompts and robust privacy guardrails for secure AI applications in sensitive workflows. Its potential goes even further: creating an ideal, data-backed sales playbook tailored to individuals, enabling real-time feedback during calls for on-the-fly adjustments, and extending the tool to improve performance across all sales calls.
AI-enhanced fleet management
The team focused on automating dashboard creation for fleet management in the existing client project. Using sanitized test data, they integrated an AI assistant capable of generating charts from natural language inputs, making the system more intuitive. By testing both Azure OpenAI and local models, the team explored semantic kernel libraries and emphasized the need for refined prompts and better resources to enhance future development.
An alternative approach for simplifying chart creation
This project also tackled simplifying chart creation within the existing client project but employed a distinct technical strategy. The team developed a scalable, modular framework driven by an assistant, designed to adapt to various use cases. While debugging AI workflows posed challenges, the team’s work highlighted opportunities for further system enhancements including integrating voice-enabled features.
Navigator AI
Navigator AI was designed to streamline searches for internal resources, such as employee expertise and project history, to improve productivity and decision-making within our company. The team built a multi-agent system capable of querying different data sources and returning unified results. They gained experience working with Python and Azure AI services while addressing issues related to inconsistent data. Prompt engineering was a critical focus in ensuring the accuracy and effectiveness of system responses.
Employee engagement enhancement
This project sought to increase participation in the internal task reward system by tailoring tasks to match employees’ skills and aspirations while reflecting the company’s values and goals. Employee surveys emphasized that personalization is a key factor in driving satisfaction and alignment with company objectives. As a result, the team created a chatbot assistant that generated tailored tasks based on user input, aiming to boost engagement and motivation.
The resulting solutions showcased their technical and strategic thinking and not only showcased their technical and strategic thinking but also underscored the potential for such initiatives to be further developed and strengthened within EffectiveSoft.
Looking ahead
The resulting solutions not only showcased the technical and strategic thinking of the teams but also uncovered the potential for such initiatives. Committed to effective results, the EffectiveSoft team continues discovering new ways we can deliver value to our clients using generative AI. We expect to hold quarterly hackathons going forward, changing and improving the event as we go.
