Workato Announces Winners of Annual Employee-Led Automation and AI Hackathon

By Business Wire On Jun 12, 2023

With Automation and AI top of mind, the leading iPaaS hosted its second company-wide hackathon with over a third of the company registering to compete

Workato, the leading enterprise automation platform, announced the winning teams and solutions of this year’s company-wide Automation Hackathon. Created to reimagine the possibilities with automation and AI, Workato’s Automation Hackathon was open to all employees, regardless of department, technical background, or tenure at the company. The panel of judges reviewed over 48 entries from across the company with 50% of our administration team participating, while 45% of our legal team also submitted solutions. 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 spotlight on generative AI and tools like ChatGPT, participants were encouraged to leverage Workato’s own OpenAI Connector.

“With teams representing our global reach, this year’s winners exemplify how transformational AI and automation are together. I’d like to thank everyone who participated and demonstrated Workato’s commitment to excellence.”

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.

“The great thing about working with a low-code/no-code platform is that anyone can use it and feel empowered, regardless of their technical background. With a safe environment, people from every department across an organization can and should bring their ideas to life,” said Carter Busse, CIO at Workato. “With AI at the forefront of every discussion, over 30% of our company participated in creating tactical, useful, and creative AI and automation solutions for our platform and community. I am beyond proud of the 48 teams that submitted to this year’s Automation Hackathon, demonstrating the power of automation and AI.”

All entries were evaluated on Business Value, Marketability, Completeness, Creativity, and Artificial Intelligence. The following winners were selected by a panel of internal judges:

Best Use Case for AI | Team Isabelle: Based in Europe and Singapore, Team Isabelle developed Chronicler, a ChatGPT fueled solution that helps individuals find documentation and notes on recipes that have been built by users. Through the Recipe Chronicler, you can easily fill out a form for the recipe in question which will trigger a workflow using ChatGPT which generates the document. Users can then make corrections to the document and mark it complete which then starts the process of creating a page within Confluence. The Confluence page contains the AI-powered summary of the recipe, timestamps, and who created it, along with a link to the recipe. Chronicler helps solve the ongoing problem of not documenting recipe workflow.
Most Creative | Team GAST Pedal: Based in the U.S., Team GAST Pedal created DossNow, a tool to help sales teams build a dossier of information for intake calls before they even happen. Through Google Calendar invites, DossNow will pull all available information from your CRM and public domains like LinkedIn, to help you learn who you’re talking to, why they’re on this call and any other background information that’s important to take the prospect to the next phase. DossNow helps save time and effort in compiling research necessary for initial intake calls.
Most Innovative | Team The Wizard: Based in the U.S., Team The Wizard developed Accelerators on Workato solution, which is a framework that allows users to submit requests to get accelerators deployed to their workspace with zero manual effort required. This will help speed up the time to value for Workato accelerators and helps take the guesswork out of setting the accelerator up. All of this is captured in an easy-to-fill-out form with minimal parameters required, which then enables an entire integration or process automatically.
Biggest Value for Customers | Team Ocean Pacific Peace: Based in Singapore and Japan, Team Ocean Pacific Peace wanted to create a solution that would help both our CSM teams and customers break through certain language barriers. Team Ocean Pacific Peace found that a lot of Workato employees were wasting time asking if certain case study decks were translated into different languages. To their surprise, there wasn’t a solution that could easily and accurately translate entire decks into different languages. Enter Deckbot version 2 which uses Google Translate and an additional verification step to accurately translate a deck into the customer’s first language. The updated Deckbot follows the same formatting as the original deck, reduces time spent on updated content and translating by up to 90%, and saves the verified translated version into Highspot for others to use.
Biggest Internal Use Impact | Team M.F.J.P.: Based in Singapore and the Philippines, Team M.F.J.P. wanted to address the time spent creating and executing events, from webinars to in-person customer and partner events. Introducing EventBot, which automates the heaving lifting and legwork of event creation and management. The event organizer can enter information such as when the event will take place, location, reason for the event, and more. EventBot then generates a list of assets that will need to be completed ahead of time as well as an event campaign in Marketo, event tool kit, copy for email invites, notifications every time there’s a new sign-up, generate name tags in Google Slides, and more. With EventBot, human error is decreased, teams can save 5-8 hours of time per event, and EventBot even increases productivity.
Best Overall Hack | Team ‘Did you put your name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry? He asked calmly’: Based in the U.S. and Singapore, Team Did you put your name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry? He asked calmly developed the Eventful Pipe Gen Pack that helps cut down the time spent on pre- and post-event logistics for demand gen teams. First, users will fill out a pre-event form which is captured by a Workato recipe. Once a recipe is created it triggers a sequence of other automations including a Marketo campaign. Zoom invites, Salesforce data, an event kit, and more. After an event has concluded, an event summary deck is created with ChatGPT that includes a segmented attendees list as well as a generated list of potential leads that you can follow up with within 24 hours of the event. The Eventful Pipe Gen Pack will help reduce event ops from 10 hours to 5 minutes and help teams always hit their pipeline goals.

“For the second year in a row, our team of curious, innovative, and talented individuals delivered tangible solutions for our Automation Hackathon. This type of commitment and participation truly speaks to not only the culture and people at Workato but also how versatile and easy our AI and automation tools are to use,” said Stephanie Dwight, Senior Director, Automations and Applications. “With teams representing our global reach, this year’s winners exemplify how transformational AI and automation are together. I’d like to thank everyone who participated and demonstrated Workato’s commitment to excellence.”

Named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for iPaaS, Workato enables enterprises to automate their business processes across the organization by integrating their applications, data, and experiences. Designed with best-in-class security and governance, scalability, performance, and availability, Workato’s low-code, no-code platform makes it easy for IT and business teams to integrate their applications and automate their processes, drawing from thousands of automation “recipes” built by the Workato community. With Workato’s democratized approach to automation and integration, business technologists are empowered to fuel their organization’s digital transformation.

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