Silvertreebrands set out to explore how artificial intelligence could be used throughout the business, not just by developers or the tech team, but by everyone. We ran a series of AI training sessions designed for everyday staff at Pet Heaven, Faithful to Nature, and UCOOK. The goal? Demystify AI and show our teams what's possible with the tools available today.
The response exceeded expectations. People were energised, full of ideas, and eager to experiment. So we asked what would happen if we let them build something?
The hackathon.
We launched Silvertreebrands' first all-hands AI Hackathon. The brief was open-ended: Find a real business problem, use AI to solve it, and show us what you've built. No coding experience required. Entries could be anything, an app, a workflow, an automated process, a customer-facing tool, as long as AI played a meaningful role.
The competition was open to individuals and small teams from all brands. To keep things accessible, we kept the barrier to entry low with ongoing support through office hours and a clear set of judging criteria explained in plain language.
We asked contestants to focus on three things:
- the problem they were solving,
- how they used AI to solve it, and
- how close they got to a working solution.
The entries.
The ideas covered operations, customer experience, internal knowledge management, and marketing, reflecting the breadth of challenges our teams face daily at Pet Heaven, Faithful to Nature, and UCOOK.
Among the entries were solutions tackling everything from AI-powered project planning and market trend analysis to personalised customer service tools, interactive product recommendation experiences, internal knowledge assistants, and value added app additions.
What stood out was not just the creativity of the ideas, but the ambition. These were practical solutions to real problems, built by people who, in many cases, had only started learning about AI tools a few weeks earlier.
The demos.
Finalists presented their work over two rounds. Contestants walked through their solutions and answered questions from the panel and curious audience members. The format was deliberately relaxed, more show-and-tell than boardroom pitch, to encourage people to focus on what they built rather than how polished their presentation was.
After much deliberation, two winners were selected:
- Best Execution - Roxane Templeman
- Broadest Impact - Masechaba Khoza
Each finalist received a prize in recognition of the exceptionally high standard of all the entries.
What happens now?
Every finalist entry has some real relevance. Some are tools that are already ready for use, and access credentials are being shared. In other cases, we’re pairing developers with the project creators, to look at deployment to our customers.
What did we learn?
Some of our lessons might sound obvious, but we really saw them come to life: AI tools allow even non-technical users to build amazing functionality, make it look good, and deploy it. But also, deployment and connecting to existing systems is often the hardest part, where the tech team needs to get involved.
Nonetheless, the quality of products was surprising, and also the breadth of entrants. Our winners were from the finance and digital product teams, neither technical roles, but both built and deployed full, technical systems using off-the-shelf AI tools.
Also critical as the starting point was our all-staff training sessions. We took a chance and made these fairly technical, demoing serious app-building tools rather than just consumer chatbots. The results really validated this choice: technical knowledge is not required to use modern tools!
What's next?
The AI Hackathon will become an annual event at Silvertreebrands. We're already looking forward to next year, and based on the standard set this time around, the bar is going to be high.
To everyone who entered, presented, judged, supported, and cheered each other on; thank you. This is exactly the kind of innovative culture we want to build: accessible, collaborative, and driven by the people closest to the problems.
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