Why Hackathons Are the Best Kept Secret to Drive GTM Innovation

True or false: Hacking events are for product and engineering teams.

Most would say true, and they’re partially right. Hackathons famously got their start with these teams, and it’s a time-tested way to spark creativity and growth. But today, thanks to AI, more teams can participate, which presents an opportunity to expand operational leverage.

At Amplitude, one of the most effective ways we’ve accelerated AI adoption across the business is through hackathons. We no longer treat them as one-off events, but as a repeatable mechanism for experimentation across lines of business.

The results that changed our perspective

Over the last six months, we’ve run seven large AI hackathons across product, marketing, sales, and operations teams.

These hackathons have led to:

• Over 1,000 AI agents
• Dozens of productized agents moving into daily workflows
• GTM teams shaping the way AI is applied to revenue-critical processes

Many of our most impactful GTM AI use cases were shaped through this model, including account planning, deal support, renewals, post-sales transitions, and content generation.

Our teams have never been short on ideas. But with AI, they now have the confidence (and the tools) to prototype exactly what they want.

Why hackathons work when traditional AI rollouts stall

For the past couple of years, teams have been trying to increase the adoption of AI internally. Most of those efforts fall short of their goals. Rather than try to diagnose why AI rollouts fail, I think it’s better to focus on why hackathons succeed at getting new users (especially GTM teams) to pick up new tools.

They lower the cost of trying

Hackathons don’t force people to use new technology. Instead, they work because they create dedicated time and permission to experiment with new ways of working. Our employees have fantastic ideas about the types of things they want to build, and hackathons give them a dedicated space to bring these ideas to life. Teams are expected to try, not to be right. There’s no penalty for falling short. This lowers hesitation and accelerates learning.

They push innovation closer to the work

Some of Amplitude’s most effective AI agents have come from sales, RevOps, customer teams, and IT. These teams understand the mechanics of how our company works. They have a front-row seat to our process bottlenecks because they battle them daily. Rather than encouraging them to make slide decks or submit tickets, hackathons give them an opportunity to actually shape solutions. This means what they build almost always has legs.

They anchor experimentation in real outcomes

We ask all our hackathon teams to start with a real workflow and a real pain point. The strongest ideas focus on practical improvements to preparation, coordination, and follow-through instead of abstract demos. Everything is hands-on and real. The employees hacking are the ones with the most to gain from their execution, so they’re extremely motivated.

Five tips for getting the most out of hackathons

If you’re interested in inviting GTM teams to start hacking, here are some guidelines to give your team the best shot at success.

1. Prioritize action over perfection. Hackathon projects don’t need lots of planning. They’re about building. We timebox our sessions and prioritize working outcomes, scale, and ROI over polish.
2. Provide technical support in the room. AI makes it very easy for GTM employees to build functional tools. But there are still areas that may require an engineer to speed things up. Keep a floating AI engineer nearby for these moments. Access to these experts keeps momentum high and reduces frustration for everyone involved.
3. Keep the focus on business problems. Hackathons aren’t for moonshots, they’re for practical solutions to real bottlenecks. We keep teams focused on workflows that already exist and provide them with the flexibility to solve these problems using, and even creating, new tools. Teams have built new demand gen workflows, agents that dynamically provide updates to our community, customer advocacy dashboard agents, sales discovery agents, and more.
4. Celebrate successful people and projects. The best way to sustain momentum is to ensure the agents and winning ideas are adopted, used, and celebrated. We typically run our hacks as contests, complete with financial rewards and the promise that the idea will be built out and resourced.
5. Involve IT. IT needs to pick up where your hackers have left off. This does not mean every idea gets productized, but IT is key to ensuring the ideas you do want to build out actually get across the finish line. Most hacks need to be connected to corporate data sources. IT needs to evaluate security and privacy concerns. This step is key. At Amplitude, we established an AI Center of Excellence with our IT team to ensure we could put the best ideas into production or refine as needed.

Don’t wait for the perfect time, start hacking now

For GTM teams especially, so much progress comes from collaboration, hands-on experimentation, and repeated exposure. Hacks are an outstanding source of ideas and are without a doubt one of the best ways for teams to experiment, collaborate, ideate, and build in real time.

AI adoption never accelerates through strategy alone. It accelerates when teams are given the space and support to experiment with AI tools that remove blockers in their own work. Hackathons are the perfect way to make this happen. So, hack away—and let us know your thoughts.