Hackathons have been a privilege of technical teams for a long time — designed to address an engineering challenge using tools that are largely inaccessible to non-technical teams.
At Miro, we’ve been running company hackathons since 2016 with the intention of bringing the whole company together to solve something that’s important to the organization at large. Over the years, we’ve experimented with different setups: creating teams with engineering and non-engineering members having separate tracks for technical and non-technical teams; and hosting separate events for non-technical teams. All of these approaches had their advantages, but they didn’t achieve their primary goal of empowering everyone to feel and act like a builder.
So, as AI became more accessible, we started to think about how to create a fun and playful way for teams across the organization to get hands-on experience with the new technology. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, our product provided the perfect solution.
In 2025, we launched an update to our Miro AI platform, and, before putting it to the hands of customers, we experimented with it internally. Our annual hackathon offered the perfect opportunity to explore all of the creative ways we could stretch its functionality and stress test the product we had built. The outcomes were beyond our expectations, with a lot of teams using Miro Flows and Sidekicks to hack business processes and change their ways of working. Here are two of the standout projects from our summer hackathon that showcase Flows and Sidekicks in action.
PrepMate: prepare for customer conversations with ease
This project came from Prakash, Customer Service Manager turned Solutions Engineer. One of Prakash’s operating principles is leading with empathy in his conversations with customers and prospects, diving deep into their needs to find the best solution for their problem. As you can imagine, it requires a lot of manual effort and research.
Project pitch: The clock was ticking. A high-stakes meeting with a VP of Product was suddenly on the calendar, and the sales team had zero prep time. Normally, this would trigger a frantic scramble for industry reports and generic talking points — a recipe for an unprofessional, exhausting pitch.
This real-world sales nightmare was the inspiration for PrepMate, a Hackathon project built on Miro AI. The team’s vision: transform minimal information into maximum sales impact.
With PrepMate, a sales professional simply enters three things into their Miro board: the prospect’s name (e.g., BMW), industry (automotive), and contact title (VP of Product).
- Conversation Starter: PrepMate instantly delivers a crisp, AI-powered slide of critical business issues and relevant metrics, pulled from similar customer interactions. This deep context, delivered immediately, makes the sales rep look like they’ve done weeks of research.
- Discovery Bot: During the meeting, as the customer shares challenges on sticky notes, the AI Sidekick subtly suggests razor-sharp, custom follow-up questions, deepening the consultative conversation.
- Menu Builder: As the call winds down, PrepMate synthesizes the initial insights and all the discovery responses into a tailored presentation menu — a custom-built solution, not a generic deck.
PrepMate transforms last-minute panic into a confident, consultative conversation, building trust and winning deals, one AI-powered meeting on Miro at a time.
RAMS: high-touch event planner
Executive roundtables are a highly effective lever for generating pipeline, but they are extremely difficult to scale due to the coordination of countless moving parts. This manual effort was leading to burnout.
For hackathon week, the Regional Marketing AMER team’s goal was to automate the repetitive tasks of the event planning process, freeing them up to focus on creating meaningful experiences.
The working prototype, which combines Flows and Zapier integrations on the Miro canvas, surpassed expectations. The Flow pulls in relevant context to create a comprehensive event brief, eliminating the need to start from scratch. From this single event brief, the system automatically creates project entries in Coda, generates global marketing campaign information, and identifies the top 100 local restaurants for venue selection.
The future of innovation: hacking business processes
The democratization of hackathons at Miro, propelled by the accessibility of the Miro AI platform, has fundamentally shifted the culture of innovation within the company. The accessibility of the Miro AI platform propelled the democratization of hacakthons at Miro and shifted the culture of innovation within the company.
Equipped with tools like Miro AI Flows and Sidekicks, non-technical teams were empowered to participate in the 2025 hackathon which moved beyond solving mere engineering challenges to hacking business processes. As projects like PrepMate and RAMS demonstrate, the outcome was a surge of creativity that directly addressed core organizational pains — transforming sales preparation and automating high-touch event planning.
When technology is made accessible and playful, true builders emerge from every corner of the organization, proving that the future of enterprise innovation is not just about what we build, but who gets to build it.
