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Each year, the AskNicely team carves out time to explore, imagine, and experiment with the future of AI. Our annual AI Hackathon, which took place in July in Auckland, was a celebration of bold ideas, brave thinking, and building the next wave of tools to empower frontline teams.
When we set to work on something like our hackathon, we know it’s not just about the technology, but the impact we can create for our users. “AI is evolving extremely fast compared to other technologies we’ve seen,” Vlad Pashchenko, Head of Product. So, it’s important for it to be something teams consistently think about and address.
Hackathons at AskNicely are more than an annual tradition. They’re a launchpad for ideas that challenge the status quo. Everyone from product managers to marketers, and engineers to our customer success teams gets involved, submitting ideas informed by frontline feedback, customer insights, market shifts, and sometimes, a spark of an idea.Â
“The criteria for the hackathon this year were around customer feedback, market trends, and bravery. What do I mean by bravery? What are the ideas that would normally be really scary, that would give us a little bit of pause, and we aren't even sure how we would approach them from a technical perspective, and let’s run head-on into those ideas,” said Vlad.Â
That bravery can be enough to inspire the hackathon teams to chase ideas that don’t yet have solutions in the market. It’s exploring what's technically uncertain and dreaming beyond today’s playbook. We’ve seen the results of this type of thinking in our previous year’s hackathon, too.Â
Our 2024 hackathon led to the launch of NiceAI, and three features that are already reshaping the way our customers collect and act on feedback:
In particular, Dynamic Surveys have proven transformative, generating 3x more qualitative feedback than traditional surveys. That kind of real-world impact drives us forward.
This year, the team was just as energized about the ideas we explored. While we’re not revealing what’s coming (yet), we can say this: the future of customer experience is looking bright.
For one week, our Auckland HQ became a hive of prototyping and possibility. Guided by customer voices and inspired by emerging trends, our engineering team took center stage, building functional prototypes in record time.
We were joined by AI experts from AWS and JD Tracks from Autohive, all leaders in AI agent development, who sparked deeper thinking and helped sharpen our ideas.
This hackathon wasn’t just about experimentation for the sake of novelty. It was about purposeful building: exploring where AI can truly make work easier, faster, and more human, especially for the people on the frontlines.
The AskNicely AI Hackathon is about more than just building. It’s about stretching the way we think, leveling up our technical and creative skills, and investing in the future — not just of our product, but of our people. “We need to embed this level of curiosity, innovation, and experimentation into our teams all the time,” said Paul Shingles, Chief Product Officer at AskNicely.
We believe the most impactful tech begins with the courage to ask, “What if?”
And thanks to the energy, curiosity, and commitment of our team, we’re already working on turning those “what ifs” into “what’s next.”
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