Organizing a hackathon is a way for software engineers, developers, and ethical hackers come together to collaborate and create innovative ideas with realistic solutions to every day problems.
Hackathons are a great opportunity and way to take time to think about different challenges that you may not ever be exposed to in your day to day work. Hackathons allow you as a developer, engineer, test analyst, or designer to work in smaller teams (or even individually) to come up with an innovative new solutions. Hackathons allow you time to explore technologies that you may have had on the backburner. If you’ve never thought about chatbot technologies and using data to help drive design, development, and solve information seeking problems, hackathons are a great way to get introduced to the tech stack.
Having been an engineering manager, I’ve always tried to motivate my team to put their all in a hackathon. This allowed them to not only develop their individual skillsets, but it also allows creativity to continue churning when they were back to their normal day to day work.
Chatbot technology stacks can easily be learned with the latest innovations in cloud technologies, so you can spin up an chatbot agent in a matter of minutes as long as you have an idea of what problem your chatbot can solve. Below are some great ideas for chatbot hackathon projects.
Chatbot Hackathon Ideas
Hackathons generally have niche and sub-topics where you can start innovating on. Here are a few categorized by the audience of the chatbot.
Enterprise Chatbot Hackathon Ideas
Enterprise chatbots can generally be installed on most common platforms where your organizations use to have employees communicate with each other. This includes Microsoft Teams, Slack, or any other enterprise platforms.
1. Look up employee information by employee id and name. The ROI can be calculated in terms of time savings and efficiencies.
2. Look up employee organizational relationship to another. Having a chatbot answer “Who is the common leadership between X and Y?” is a great way to help employees understand stakeholders across organizations.
3. Look up where an employee is physically located on a floor. This can be done using the Active Directory if the organization has this information.
4. Answer Frequently Asked Questions around computer or phone upgrades. If you have a corporate environment, chances are people ask a lot about upgrades for their work devices. This is a great way to reduce the amount of service tickets asking the same information.
5. Lookup information about services or solutions companies offer. Often, sales and marketing people may have various questions around the service or product line of a company. Having this information readily available will help shorten the sales cycle.
6. Look up SLAs from teams. This will require having a database that has this information stored and clean. Being able to lookup Service Level Agreements will allow teams to better roadmap and plan their projects.
7. A chatbot can be setup to ask about downtime or uptime on a certain service. This will allow less tickets and less email influx when a situation arises.
8. Forecasting and looking up information on billability and hours by managers. This will allow managers to quickly review capacity of their team.
9. Chatbots can answer frequently asked questions from Human Resources around benefits enrollment and other related statuses.
10. Chatbots can also be designed to setup meetings between two people and add a room if needed.
11. Chatbots can be setup to send out email inquiries to a team. This will allow your team to quickly send out queries and gather responses easily.
12. Chatbots can be setup for devops and tell you when a service that your team owns is down.
13. Chatbots can provide information from a customer relationship management database, providing sales and marketing teams information on customers. This can also be used in support organizations.
14. Chatbots can be setup to update JIRAs, VersionOne, or Microsoft Project with information. In addition, it can enable proactive notifications in order to gather this information.
15. Chatbots can also be setup to create any type of proactive notification that you want to send out to your employees.
Chatbot Consumer Hackathon Ideas
16. You can use chatbots to help answer common questions as a top level funnel on your main website.
17. Chatbots can help with first line customer service and then handover to a live agent.
18. Chatbots can gather information from customers for followup conversations after a customer goes through a conversation. This can help generate leads for the sales and marketing team.
19. Chatbots can be integrated to help answer the most common questions on social media channels, gather sentiments, and allow that information to be gathered to create more content for what customers are asking about.
20. Chatbots can help funnel customers into specific product discussions, allowing your company to lead a consumer to the right product or service.
21. Chatbots can be integrated into larger consumer platforms like Alexa or Google to help answer questions with conversational voice about your business.
22. Chatbots can help customers schedule meetings with your sales team, allowing your human resources to be focused on more strategic work than administrative work.
23. Chatbots can help provide data and insights to your customer based on the questions they are asking about their accounts. Algorithms and calculations can be programmed with the chatbot to provide a total of a customer’s bill or spend in a certain time period.
24. Chatbots can be setup to automate the most common tasks for customer service representatives to better enable consumers to interact with your business during non-business hours.
25. Chatbots can be integrated to funnel top level sales all the way to customer service after a customer has journeyed into the sales funnel. The data from the conversation a chatbot has with an organization can help the business better understand how they can best serve their customer.
Chatbot Technologies to Use During Hackathon
These are a few ideas on frameworks and technologies that you can start using to start planning the architecture around a chatbot: chatbot large cloud provider chatbots.
Some of the frameworks are easier to setup, some will require little to no code, and some with have easier reporting and insights.
Using a hackathon to use all of these platforms (generally at a very low cost to spin up) will allow your teams to explore what chatbots can do, the available platforms, and be creative in the types of business problems these technologies can solve.
Summary
The chatbot hackathon ideas listed will hopefully allow you to discover and spur some additional innovative ideas on how you can compete at your next challenge. Hackathons are a great way to level up your technical skillset by using new technologies, like chatbots and conversational agents, that you would have otherwise not had an opportunity to during your day to day work.
Other Chatbot Posts You Might Like
Below are other blog post ideas that you might like around chatbots and digital assistants: