How Centific’s First Global Hackathon Unleashed Innovation Using ChatGPT

By David Hsu, Associate Vice President, Digital Engineering Services, and Muthukaruppan Lakshmanan, Vice President of Global Delivery

It goes without saying, but innovation fuels our growth at Centific. Innovation bubbles to the surface every day among our own people as they work together. So, how can we capture great ideas that our teams generate through the natural intellectual curiosity applied to client work? The answer is a global hackathon! In that spirit, we’re proud to share how Centific tapped into our incredible pool of talented technology professionals through our first virtual global hackathon.

48 Hours to Glory

In total, we had 72 employees forming 24 teams who were tasked with creating innovative uses of ChatGPT that addressed specific Centific business needs. Each team was given 48 hours to submit applications of ChatGPT in categories ranging from self-service (the elimination of manual tasks) to productivity enhancement (the elimination of repetitive tasks). Twenty two teams made the deadline. From there, a panel of judges -- Surya Prabha Vadlamani, Tirupati Rao Dockara, and Zili Tong -- identified the Top 10 teams based on criterion ranging from the uniqueness of the idea to value delivered. Each team demonstrated their projects virtually to judges over two thrilling and inspiring days.

Why the focus on ChatGPT, the fastest growing app of all time? Well, at this point, it might be better to ask why not? Generative AI continues to demonstrate potential to transform how businesses operate and people behave from searching online to coding. It’s no surprise that generative AI has sparked considerable discussion about the responsible use of AI. Centific has been carefully adopting forms of generative AI, including ChatGPT, with a focus on applying it in a responsible way for our clients. A hackathon is a perfect way to understand its business value as well as limitations.

The Cream of the Crop

We’re proud to share the Top Three finalists!

The winner: Reconnecting with Travel
Team name: I Wanna

Our winning team wanted to use ChatGPT to customize travel experiences according to flow of the dialogue instead of the typical scripted path of the chatbot. Using the functions of ChatGPT, the existing system calls ChatGPT to optimize the current search engine, so as to better match the personalized needs of users. Then, the results of ChatGPT are processed and optimized first and returned to customers. Each destination is matched with recommended travel routes, so as to improve customer experience and meet the needs of customers.

And we have two second-place finishers:

Language Services with ChatGPT
Team name: the Kung Fu Pandas

This project is a web application that uses ChatGPT APIs to automatically identify the languages used in a website’s content and provide a comprehensive localization verification process. It can detect content issues, geopolitical risks, and translation issues, and provide improvement suggestions. The solution fills a gap in the market by providing an end-to-end localization AI validation tool that traditional solutions cannot match.

Swift Data Pipeline: Develop a data analytics pipeline with a low-code environment
Team name: the Blackbirds

The Swift Data Pipeline is an analytics platform that makes many business scenarios more accurate and efficient with precise and tailored analytics. Our mission is to leverage ChatGPT to enhance analytics outcomes and elevate the analyst experience. Armed with high-quality business training data, our platform enables users to make informed decisions with a high level of confidence.

All our teams demonstrated the wide range of business problems that generative AI can address. So, what’s next? The teams are going to present investment plans to Centific leadership to transform these solutions into actual products and solutions. This is how ideas are born. Not every idea turns into a business solution. Some ideas turn out to solve problems that a team had not previously considered. This is what innovation is about – testing, learning, and applying. Congratulations to our winners!