The following blog post was written by Avanade alum Guhan Bala.

This past year more than 80 participants across five offices participated in Australia’s Hackathon. Supported by Avanade’s strong culture of creativity and innovation, this hackathon challenged our participants to think about what life is and will be like in an AI-first world. Organizations will need to transform, and our teams collaborated to come up with new solutions to challenges that exist today.

It was truly phenomenal to watch our people come together with such positive energy of collaboration, doing, problem-solving, camaraderie, and fun to produce innovative solutions! We do this every day for our clients, and it was powerful to see these groups apply what they know – along with some out of the box thinking - to come up with fantastic solutions that not only address business problems but also have a broader impact on our global communities.

Finally, I want to congratulate the winners from each location of Australia office locations. Read on to learn about their award-winning solutions!

Perth

Saad Khatib, Paul Fraser, Joshua Morley, Joanna Murphy, Angus Campbell

Interconnected Virtual Assistants (IVA). IVA is an extensible augmented workforce technology that connects your existing virtual assistant with other virtual assistants facilitating the growth of AI based task help. IVA allows your virtual assistant to negotiate bookings and appointments, freeing people with disabilities from the stress that can be associated with such tasks. IVA also saves the valuable time of corporate entities by doing common, but tedious, tasks.

Sydney

Winson Choo, Carol Difei Zhao, Grace Xu, Shadi Samadi

Team Verdant. An application that connects conscientious consumers direct to supermarkets to help eliminate food waste. Consumers would have the ability to reserve cut price food (that was ready to be dumped) and add to their regular shopping list.

Melbourne

Oscar Nenji Prawata Siauw, Pushpitha Atapattu, James Gen Li, Jane Headon, Edward Jiahao Wu, Aravind Gyanbote and Biju Mathew

RACVnow app - an Uber-style concept for those needing urgent roadside assistance. RACVnow sends the job to numerous trained mechanics in the area (integrated with GPS location services) who can choose to take the job immediately. Not only does the customer have a far better overall experience but jobs are also created for skilled mechanics.

Canberra

Cameron Henkes and Gregory Tate

My Scheduling Agent. Using AI we can build a product for Avanade consultants to assist with the project staffing process. It would list your current roll off date and alert you when it is time to look for a new role (2 weeks warning), give you a list of roles that match your skills list and level and recommends new skills to add based on your current resume. Additionally, it produces a daily report for the schedulers listing: all Avanade resources available or coming available, role and skill matches, and last resume/skills update.

Brisbane

Ryan Moore, Mark Buckland, Dan Stennett, Matt Broome, Anu Rajendran

By.com. Using connected AI networks to exchange information. These open exchanges of information, supply, demands, preferences, costs or value will help individuals make informed decisions. The exchange of information is protected with Blockchain security. By.com could scale from small businesses exchanging information and allowing smart decisions to larger businesses aggregating information and provide efficient solutions. Not limited to any particular product, anything that could be considered a commodity/asset could be included. For example, shopping is an easy example to show AI making an intelligent selection of a product based on the user’s prior preferences and then selecting the lowest cost product and delivery route via an exchange of information between suppliers and couriers. The demo was displayed using Cortana as the interface to drive our By.com website.