Leader in enterprise automation hosted a company-wide hackathon with over one-third of the company registering to compete

Workato, the leading enterprise automation platform, announced the winning teams and solutions of the first ever, company-wide Automation Hackathon. Created to reimagine the possibilities with automation, Workato’s Automation Hackathon was open to all employees, regardless of department, technical background, or tenure at the company. The panel of judges reviewed 44 entries from across the company, with employees from India, Singapore, and the US crowned as winners. Led by Workato’s Chief Information Office, Carter Busse, and Stephanie Dwight, Senior Director, Automations and Applications, the competition emphasized the low-code/no-code capabilities of all Workato employees.

With a month to ideate, develop, and execute a hack on the Workato platform, employees were able to work across departments and with colleagues they wouldn’t normally interact with on a regular basis. This Hackathon encouraged all Workato employees to tap into the creative side of automation using the company’s own automation tools. Workato aimed to empower employees to realize their full potential and showcase how automation is not about replacing humans, but about letting everyone focus more on valuable and meaningful work.

“I am beyond proud of the 44 teams (30% of the company) that participated in our first company-wide Automation Hackathon. It is truly evident that automation is a creative medium and I cannot wait to see what’s to come.”

“Empowering every employee, no matter their technical background, to innovate and solve real-life problems through automation is a key part of our culture at Workato. Anyone can have great automation ideas, and provided the right tooling and the right guardrails, they should be empowered to build their creativity,” said Carter Busse, CIO at Workato. “I am beyond proud of the 44 teams (30% of the company) that participated in our first company-wide Automation Hackathon. It is truly evident that automation is a creative medium and I cannot wait to see what’s to come.”

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All entries were evaluated on the business value, marketability, maximization of resources, creativity, unexpected use of technology and features, and completeness. The following winners were selected by a panel of internal judges:

• Biggest Value for Customers – Team Army Ants: With team members from India and Singapore, Team Army Ants created an Automated Recipe Review solution that reviews all projects in Workato based on best practices and organizational compliances. Automated Recipe Review can help individual organizations streamline Workato best practices at scale, bridge the gap between IT and employee-developed recipes, and ensure consistency across automations.

• Biggest Value for Internal Use – Team Me, Myself & I (+ Andrew): Team Me, Myself & I (+ Andrew) from Singapore saw that Workato employees were spending a large chunk of time building customized decks for external use. To cut down on the amount of time per day an employee spends on creating decks, Team Me, Myself & I (+ Andrew) developed the Deck Bot, which skims all relevant applications and pulls the required content for personalized decks. The team estimates Deck Bot could reduce the amount of time spent on creating decks by 90%, leaving time to work on value-adding activities.

• Most Innovative – Team Redding to Automate: Based in the U.S., Team Redding to Automate leaned into Workato’s love for sports and the company’s mission of “painting the town teal” through curated events. The team thought, what if there was an easier way to find upcoming sporting events in cities where customers are? To meet this need, they developed the SportBot, a Slack-integrated bot that helps find sporting events based on location, time, and where customers are located. To take it another step further, SportBot also provides URLs to purchase tickets and customer contact information so you can directly invite them to the sporting event.

• Most Whacky – Team Just Do It: Team Just Do It, hailing from the U.S. and Singapore, wanted to create a solution that would store all the pictures and videos that employees share on Slack. The team developed the Memories Bot, an easy way to capture and rekindle memories shared on Slack. When the Memories Bot is used in a channel, it automatically scans for any photos or videos and creates a shared photo album with Google. The Memories Bot ensures that any individual’s story at Workato is captured and saved.

• Best Hack Overall – Team Top Gears: For the Best Hack Overall, Team Top Gears, based in the U.S. and India, created the Gears Bot, which helps maximize all automations for an organization. Through the GEARS Framework – Govern, Enable, Adopt, Run, and Scale – individuals running the bot can ensure compliance on current projects, make knowledge accessible to all, improve adoption among most used apps, predict high-risk consuming automations, estimate the value of automation ideas, and so much more.

“To bring the idea of a global hackathon to the table and be able to execute it with such great results speaks to the type of culture and workforce Workato has been building from the start. I am beyond proud of all of those who participated across the company,” said Stephanie Dwight, Senior Director, Automations and Applications. “To have over a third of the company come together with people from all over the world and build solutions using automation is truly extraordinary.”

Workato’s Automation Hackathon also included a month-long content series highlighting points of view on why automation is the future, discussions around the great automation debate, and social media chats to help continue the conversation.

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