#TeamDigital hackathon: How much can you innovate in 24 hours?

A lot, as it turns out, for the more than 40 participants in our internal AI Digital Hackathon! 

The Digital team hosted their second Hackathon with great cross-functional participation from Digital Technology, Product Engineering, Thomson Reuters Labs, and Cognitive Computing Center. The theme of the Hackathon was geared around AI and Machine Learning. There were some wonderful ideas, executions and a whole lot of learning that took place. 

Our digital teammates split into seven teams, each focused on novel concepts to improve our digital products and services leveraging Artificial Intelligence.

“Every team was focused on something that is critical to our success going forward,” said Chief Digital Officer, Karen Stroup, who sat on the panel of judges. “We need to implement some version of each of these ideas in the future.”

Each team was only given 24 hours to outline, build a prototype, and create a video explaining how it would work and could benefit the company. Teams were then judged on four criteria: How it could positively impact the business, how realistic it was, has it been done before, and do the prototypes leave a lasting impression?

In the end, team AI Explorer, which proposed AI-powered exploratory UI testing to improve the quality of our digital products was declared the winner.
 

“What made the hackathon so successful was that it brought together colleagues from across Thomson Reuters and our partners to create solutions that will benefit our business,” said Rob Newnes-Smith, Head of Technology, Digital, Employees & Partners, one of the judges. “I especially loved seeing colleagues from Legal Tech, Tax & Accounting Professionals Tech, C3 and the TR Labs breaking down silos with Enterprise Digital, Commercial Data, DEP and others. In this time where we are all working remotely, collaborating in this way was not only really fun, but led to some truly innovative thinking.”

All the hackathon solutions have great strategic relevance and the potential to change the trajectory of our digital offerings and services.

Our digital Hackathon is a great way to bring our teammates together as we all work remotely. It was amazing to see how our teams pushed the boundaries of creativity, collaboration, and innovation to build solutions for our future.

About

Christian Metzger is the VP, Digital Experience Platform for the Enterprise Digital Office, based out of Toronto.

Do you want to create cutting-edge technology on a collaborative and innovative team? Explore our open technology roles and apply now to join the team #WorkingAtTR.