We teach companies AI by having their teams build with it

I walk into the room, Ido turns to me and says: "It's fascinating, this feels like the discovery of the internet." After our first AI Hackathon, I knew exactly what he was talking about

While I spent the 90s internet boom in diapers, Ido was already working and witnessing this revolution firsthand. He told me that back then, most people underestimated what was coming.

The internet looked like a fragmented, chaotic experiment. Scrappy websites and clunky tools. What people didn't see in the beginning: A completely new infrastructure for work, communication, and business was being built.

For people that have experienced this before, AI feels identical for them.

Our AI hackathon a couple weeks ago showed me why. Our creative team built an AI creative strategy assistant that generates research, pulls best-performing ad concepts and writes briefs. What used to take our team 4-6 hours per brief now happens in minutes. That's around 80+ hours saved per week.

Another team built a tool that analyzes campaign performance and suggests optimizations in real-time. Another one automated client reporting. This is the shift that's happening right now:

Teams can now solve their own problems faster. People with zero coding skills can build software tools. Companies that adopt AI fast will have an unfair advantage in the next few years.

That's why I sent this to the team after the hackathon:

"I believe we have one of the most exciting times ahead of us. Ido told me that he experienced something similar before: when the internet was discovered. Now it's AI. Let's be early adopters."

We're building AI tools for our clients. We're building them for ourselves.

The time is now. Let's build.

Every day, you feel more behind on AI. So for 24hrs, we locked ourselves into the office for our 1st internal AI hackathon, fueled by pizza and lots of Red Bull.

At 11 pm on a random Friday night in March, I found myself fixing the UI of an AI copilot that leverages years of pipeline and deal intelligence to make our sales efforts more efficient. Even though that wasn't on my bingo card for 2026, I loved every second of it.

How this happened:

Being on LinkedIn these days gives you FOMO. Every single day, a new AI tool or feature launches. And with every new launch, you develop a bigger feeling of being behind (or am I the only one?!)

The only way to work against this, is by working more. By using your evenings and weekends (that were meant for recharging) to work with AI.

But still then, you barely - if ever - have enough uninterrupted time to dive deep into these tools.

And that's exactly why we did an internal AI hackathon.

With 5 teams of 2-3 experts each, we spent two full days (Friday and Saturday) exploring how we can integrate AI in our existing services to make them even better and understand how the agency business of the future can look like.

What products these teams built? You'll find it in the video (next to a bunch of people having the times of their lives)

Sneak peak: One team created a creative strategy assistant that helps throughout the entire process from research to creative brief. What used to take a lot of manual, human, work is now strongly supported by AI so that the expert can focus more on the most creative work.

My takeaway:

It's honestly crazy to see what you can build these days - without having any coding knowledge. I would have never thought to walk out of this hackathon with 5 products that are ready to go live (with a little bit of tweaking) and add unreal value to our services.

What a time to be alive.

PS: Huge shoutout to Tim Jamboula for the great hackathon organisation and to Luis Budow for capturing the whole hackathon perfectly in this awesome video. Highly recommend both of them!

POV: It's 11:07 pm on a Friday night. The office is full of people vibe-coding solutions that will make their work better. There's pizza & red bull. Life is good. How it all started:

If you're in tech, you know Peter Steinberger and the insane story of OpenClaw. What inspired me most is the fact that it allegedly only took him a couple of hours to build the first prototype back in November

Yes, Peter is a coder. BUT: Thanks to tools like Lovable & Co., you don't need developer skills to build software anymore. That's why I invited our teams to an AI hackathon last Friday, even though they have zero coding experience.

My vision behind the initiative:

> explore how we can integrate AI into our services for even better results > brainstorm how the agency model of the future looks like > get our top experts into AI building mode

The hackathon setup was simple: 5 teams, 24 hours, unlimited Lovable, Cursor, ChatGPT, Gamma, Higgsfield and Manus credits. The most valuable AI product built from scratch wins.

The results were absolutely CRAZY. I was running around the office like a kid in a candy store because I couldn't decide which project was the coolest to watch. It was awesome to see the level of energy everybody had after a full week of work (okay, Red Bull might have helped).

Congrats to the winning team Marie, Lisa, and Dennis - well done.

What makes me proud is the fact that at the end, we had 5 fully functioning prototypes. All of them are ready to ship this week, boosting our productivity and quality of work. This speed seemed impossible a few years ago. The fact that it's now doable within 24 hours blows my mind.

If you're asking yourself for "the right AI use case," just ask your team.

Bonus points if you let them build the solution themselves.

PS: Thanks to Tim Jamboula and Joshua Heller for organizing the first YOYABA AI hackathon (highly recommend them). To be continued