As individuals, we often find ourselves caught up in the demands of our quarterly plans and the weight of our ever-growing backlogs. Luckily, we have hackathons to provide a pause and allow us to experiment with something new!
The header image is generated by Midjourney. The prompt is at a hackathon, fifteen enthusiastic software engineers, both women and men, collaborating near laptops and whiteboards in a spaceship room. Various charts and grocery products were depicted on the whiteboards. Pixel art.
Another Hackathon?
No wait! This time we had something even more exciting! In the world of Generative AI, we discovered an opportunity to apply it within the realm of Quick Commerce — an environment that has seen rapid growth, especially during the COVID pandemic! And… The future seems exciting!
What makes this hackathon more exciting than the others?
To satisfy our customers even more and provide smarter solutions for our internal users we had the chance to explore the power of Generative AI. As users, we increasingly love customized solutions that fulfil our needs. Nothing could be wiser than exploring the potential of these tools!
In general, we organise hackathons to:
- Give our people a chance to experiment with new ideas and think outside the box in a safe environment (We ask them not to work on something from our existing roadmap explicitly!)
- Form fresh teams — instead of working with their existing teams — around these ideas which helps them to team up with people they haven’t worked with before
- Be open to new ideas to try, even though they don’t have one
- Share knowledge across squads, domains and tribes by working together on an idea
This time the main difference was the use of Generative AI. These tools are as popular as they are obscure. Perhaps most of us have begun to treat them as our personal assistants to meet our daily needs. However, many of us are unsure how to integrate it into our current business.
Challenges
The unknowns were a bit challenging for both organisers and participants, including:
- Lack of experience in using Generative AI, and technical difficulties such as authentication. But thanks to our mentors we were able to overcome them within a short period of time
- We were unable to expose our data due to legal compliance, which limited our ability to come up with a lot more crazy ideas
- Due to the performance of the Generative AI tools, the response times were slower than expected during the working demos
But none of them stopped us from trying!
The Ideas
We kicked off with nine cool ideas to use Generative AI and formed six teams to show off their skills and passion.
During the hackathon, we had the opportunity to explore the following ideas:
- NutriVizion: Providing nutrition information to enrich product details in order to help users find the best products based on their diet plans
- MealPlanner: A personalised healthy and delicious meal planner for the week based on the user’s dietary preferences, including factors such as calorie and protein intake, as well as meat consumption
- QC Chit-chat: An AI assistant to get real-time insights from organisational data lakes and visualise them to help internal users make better decisions based on the data
- Product Detector: Computer-controlled robots to help our pickers in our Dmarts, reducing human errors and operation costs
- Hero AI: A personalized shopping list based on the user’s cuisine preferences, allergens, dietary requirements, number of meals per day, budget, and duration
- Image Finder and Description Generator for Products: Find the best matching image and description for our products in order to improve user experience by having accurate information and decrease internal operational costs by reducing time-consuming manual work
And the winners…
All teams made it to the finals, impressing us with their creativity, and showcasing impressive progress in less than two days.
All teams competed with the following criteria:
- Business Impact – Does It Offer Any Value to Businesses?
- Innovativeness – Is It the Most Innovative Solution?
- Realism – Can It Be Done in the Real World?
- WOW Effect – Does It Make People Go, “Wow?”
- Tech Excellence – How good is the solution from a tech perspective?
To ensure diverse perspectives, the jury consisted of team members from different functions including tech, product, and business. At the end of the presentations, it was very difficult for the jury, as all the ideas were ambitious and the scores were very close to each other. But the criteria I mentioned above helped the jury to select a team that came first in each of the two categories. We celebrated their accomplishments with small prizes and with big applause!
Conclusion
Although data security, speed, and cost of tools, the prevalence of use, and expertise in this area are still a bit vague, having tested them in a secure environment in the early period was extremely valuable. It allowed us to explore their potential and get out of our comfort zone.
If you like what you’ve read and you’re someone who wants to work on open, interesting projects in a caring environment, we’re on the lookout for Senior Java/Kotlin Engineers. Check out our full list of open roles here – from Backend to Frontend and everything in between. We’d love to have you on board for an amazing journey ahead.
