Experimenting with Generative AI: Dynamo6’s hackathon

Have you ever wondered how a company tackles new and emerging technologies? At Dynamo6, we embrace innovation. That's why we recently held an internal hackathon focused on Generative AI, a powerful new tool with the potential to revolutionise various industries.

This blog post dives into our journey – from setting the challenge to the winning solution – showcasing the exciting possibilities Generative AI holds for the future.

Painting the scene

With our company origins based in digital transformation via cloud technology, the latest innovation to hit the world Generative AI presents a turning point. Harnessing new technology, making bold changes, and disrupting the status quo are all options on the table.

But Generative AI is a new technology. It presents challenges of understanding exactly what it is, how it can be harnessed, and the real business value it can offer. That’s what we wanted to experiment with.

So, to do that, we held an internal hackathon. A dedicated 8-hour competition, to pick up a real-world business challenge, think about how technology could solve it, create a proof of concept in various stages, and finally pitch the idea Dragon’s Den style to a panel of judges.

Setting the challenge

Drawing inspiration from our recent client projects as well as our internal support desk systems, there were four available challenges for the teams to choose from.

Before the hackathon day, all participants were kept in the dark about who their teammates were going to be and what the challenges were. Behind the scenes, the format, available challenges and prizes were set.

We shared a few guides about what a hackathon is, captured the team’s ideas for challenges they’d like to tackle, as well as a handy guide from Google Cloud on GenAI.

Our friends and technology partners at Google Cloud also supported us on the day. Providing us with guidance on the application of Vertex AI to our chosen challenges, as well as judging the four team’s end-of-day pitches.

Lifting the cloak

We kicked off the day with breakfast and a briefing. Across 8 hours, we’d form into four multi-disciplinary teams, pick a challenge to tackle and use the day to explore and come up with a solution and work to create our Proof of Concepts.

So here’s what we came up with…

OIA Smart Search

A smart assistant to improve the process and turnaround time for Official Information Act (OIA) requests for government organisations. The OIA Smart Search assistant would simplify and improve the responding body’s sourcing of information, being quicker and helping to deliver a more streamlined and overall better user experience to the requester.

Continue reading on the Dynamo6 website →