Mechathon — carsales AI Hackathon
That is a wrap, another successful Hackathon is under our belt and what fun it was!
This was our second virtual Hack since the start of COVID and it was great timing for us to connect, have fun and spend a few days building out ideas. This year we themed our Hackathon around AI and called it ‘Mechathon’. With AI technology in mind, we asked teams to look at how they could incorporate this into their hack ideas.
Getting prepared
To help everyone get comfortable and familiar with AI technology, our AI/ML and AWS team ran four hands on workshops in the lead up to Hackathon. The workshops gave attendees tips, tricks and useful skills to build and deploy AI models. Run over a number of weeks and sessions, we were able to tailor the classes to differing skill levels and ensure people from all backgrounds — technical and non-technical could attend.
We also know that no hack is complete without an abundance of snacks. As we couldn’t get together for the usual parade of treats and food vans, we sent a snack pack to everyone involved and made sure they had enough sugar to get through the Hack.
The Hack
At carsales, hackathon is an event where people and teams get to step away from their day to day and build out a new product, solve a customer problem, improve the way we do something, learn a new skill or collaborate with new people.
Hackathon starts with a Pitch where the ‘idea owner’ promotes their idea across the business to get people to help them bring their idea to life. Over a virtual Pitch session idea owners had 3 minutes to explain their idea, what they were hoping to achieve over the hack days and make a call out for team members.
A few weeks later the hack days arrived and teams got busy bringing their ideas to life. Hackathon is open to everyone at carsales and you don’t have to be technical to join. We often find it is our non-technical team members that add a differing point of view on how to shape an idea to better suit customer needs.
Over the course of three days, teams worked together to produce demos, live software and/or presentations which highlighted their idea and what problem it would solve. This year we also asked every team to produce a short video which talked to their idea. This was then shared with the broader business and everyone was then able to cast their vote for the winner of the People’s Choice award. Our Executive Leadership Team also selected a winner and our Senior Leadership team selected the winner of the Most Innovative Award.
As we couldn’t all be together for Hackathon this year, we still wanted to ensure there was a sense of excitement and activity. We hade photo competitions, prize giveaways and even a carsales trivia event hosted by our Executive Leadership Team.
Why AI?
We chose AI as a hack theme to help democratise AI within carsales. The hack was an opportunity to give developers and everyone involved, the time, skills and confidence to help them adopt AI skills post hackathon.
5 years ago, building AI tech required specialisation, however there are now many easy to use high level services and frameworks to help anyone building AI tech and our goal is to continually enable these skills within our development teams.
What did people do?
With over 150 people participating and 17 teams we saw such a wonderful array of project ideas come to life.
We saw a team champion and build a Chat Bot to help our retail customers. Another team build ‘Bubble Match Maker’ a social app to help connect people with similar interests during lockdown.
The ‘Verified Member’ team was looking at how they could make the car buying experience as safe as possible. ‘Tyre Recognition’ built an app which used AI to determine the size of your car tyre so you could easily buy the right style for your vehicle.
‘Ad Inspire’, our People’s Choice winner, presented a self-service media platform, where Dealers and Digital Account Managers could quickly build and preview on-network media campaigns.
Our ELT winner was ‘COACHR (Gary AI)’, a personalised AI sales assistant, designed to help AutoGate Pro Dealers get better insights into what is happening in their dealership.
And the Most Innovative award went to ‘Flash EV’ an app designed to connect users and sellers of electric charging stations for electric vehicles.
What did our people say about Hack?
Drew Wiechern, Product Manager, and part of the winning ‘COAHCR (Gary AI)’ team said:
“Working remotely certainly adds an extra layer of complexity to usually straight-forward tasks, and this was certainly felt by those of us participating in the most recent Hackathon. These challenges became particularly evident on the final day of the hack. With only hours remaining, we had a presentation to build which on face value was a daunting task. What we didn’t realise, was the level of skill that our team members were sitting on, that we hadn’t realised until the pressure was on. Everything from storyboarding, script writing to voice acting and video creation, the entire team stepped up to build something remarkable that captured the vibe of our three days working together, albeit very much apart. Our team worked together to sell Gary to the masses, and I’m proud to have been involved in such a fun, meaningful project.”
Louisa Goodwin, part of the People’s Choice winning team, Ad Inspire, says of her experience,
“Hackathon 2021 was a great opportunity to work with other teams, on the project Ad Inspire. Hack is always a great opportunity to be creative, then apply that inspiration to a business problem. Having the time to learn new skills from the AI Workshops was great fun. Then applying those skills to our project in Salesforce Sandbox was interesting to play around with. Overall having the company support us in coming up with creative ideas, giving us the tools and time to learn, then getting to have the experience of applying that to Ad Inspire during the hack days was a lot of fun. Looking forward to a Hackathon at the Melbourne office soon!”
What is next?
The best thing about carsales hack is that we now move to looking at how we can bringing these great ideas into our real life roadmaps.
We can’t wait to see what comes of these ideas and are already looking forward to the next hack.
No hack goes to plan without the help of all the event coordinators and participants. A big thanks to everyone involved.
