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Companies carry out hackathons to promote cooperation and to accelerate software development.
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The version of Pinterest, Makeathon, has encouraged employees to come up with ideas for new AI tools.
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This article is part of “AI in Action”, a series that investigates how companies implement AI innovations.
Because companies look at AI for productivity increases, some employees are wary. They are concerned about lost jobs, reduced creativity and ethical switches, so that many are divested by daily AI use.
Pinterest, a social media company with around 4,700 employees, has tried to tackle such concerns by keeping employees closely involved in the development of internal AI tools, so that these tools are considered efficient and useful, not only imposed from the top. The key to this mission was Pinterest’s annual Makeathon, who is in his 14th year. In the past, the competition led by the employee was usually seen as a fun way to recommend solutions, said Anirudh Koul, the generative AI Tech-Lead of Pinterest. Now, in the AI era, its usefulness has exploded.
“The overarching goal is ground-up innovation,” Koul told Business Insider. “We realized that if we can give employees the opportunity and freedom to tell us what to do, and give them some room to show the work of their concept, we may find new innovations much faster.”
Inside Pinterest’s Companywide Hackathon
Makeathon is Pinterest’s version of a Hackathon – an event where people work together to quickly make new software. Hackathons are designed to generate new ideas and to increase the involvement of employees, said Brandon Kessler of Devpost, a digital platform for running hackathons. Since the AI Boom from 2022, the demand for hackathon has exploded, Kessler told BI.
Kessler discussed the attraction of hackathons and said that the events “make people enthusiastic because they can build something they want, unlike:” Hey, all, use this tool. “
“You let people learn these new tools,” he continued, “build things that help the company and work together and have fun – all within a short period.”
Pinterest -employees witnessed this type of rapid development at the beginning of 2023, only a few months after the release of Chatgpt. Senior Director of Engineering of Pinterest, Anthony Suarez, helped with a handful of engineers to have a mini -hackathon that led to making an internal chatbot tool. Due to their official Makeathon in July, it was now Foundation-Plug-in AI system from Pinterest ready for wider use.
At Pinterest, Hackathon projects start on an internal company page where employees in different departments can register the fields. In the week before Makathon, the Koul team organizes lessons about how generative AI works and how to write prompts. There is also a class on tools without code for building apps, so that non-technical employees can still use AI solutions.
Then teams from all over departments form around an idea. Suarez collaborated the last cycle with seven Makathon teams, usually composed of colleagues with whom he had never worked before. They also have the support of Koul’s “Hack Doctors”, support staff that work throughout the company and specialize in areas such as Engineering, Design and Video editing. The Hack doctors help refine ideas and prepare teams to take questions from managers. Last year, just under 94% of the teams worked with a hack doctor.
“We usually see that a good part of the participants does not really come from Engineering,” said Koul. “They combine with engineers to bring their ideas to a higher level. We have had teams where people from six different countries come together.”
Each team produces a video citch that can view and vote colleagues as an executive level. Makeathon is strategically planned for late summer, so all resulting tools can be included in the Pinterest planning period in September and October, Suarez told BI. He estimated that more than half of these Makathon projects were financed during this cycle and called the event an ‘innovation aircraft’.
How a Makathon idea becomes an AI tool reality
During the 2023 Makathon, one of Pinterest’s sales staff had an idea: what if AI could collect and search all the internal documents of the company?
The sales employee recruited a team of 14 people, including Charlie Gu, a senior engineering manager in the Pinterest data team. Gu said that he introduced the tool as a splash-based chatbot employees who could turn instead of forcing their colleagues. However, the team knew that some existing documentation would not be up -to -date if the chatbot pulled it.
“We came up with a system where you can report answers and make new documentation,” said Gu. The team threw, built and implemented the document finder throughout the company.
The tool now answers an estimated 4,000 questions per month on average, according to Pinterest. The tool is also designed to access thousands of internal documents from Google Docs, Slack Threads and Slide Decks, said Koul, who is quite passionate about Makathon. (He called on a shaky service in a Mount Everest Base Camp to be enthusiastic about it.)
Makathon also encouraged some employees to come up with useful AI prompts. In 2024 the Koul team presented a challenge: who could think of the best questions to get Pinterest’s chatbot to produce the most accurate and precise answers? Gu said they had around 200 participants.
In this case, the fast generation of employees helped with the general goal of Pinterest to encourage the involvement of employees at AI. The effort also led Pinterest to integrate AI agents into the process of writing more precise instructions.
According to internal business surveys, 96% of Suarez team of more than 60 uses generative AI and 78% of the 1,800 engineers of the company every month reports time savings of the use of internal AI tools.
Suarez said that he “had been pretty surprised by the positive feeling” for the tools in the entire company, and added: “Part of it is that we have not forced the acceptance of these tools early, and we still don’t say:” You have to do this. ” We try to come up with value here. “
Read the original article about Business Insider
