AI innovation across borders: Alma Media Hackathon delivered strong results

Alma Media organised its first group-wide AI hackathon. Six international teams combined their expertise in product development, data, and AI to build AI-based solutions for the company’s digital services over two days.

Collaboration across businesses creates competitive advantage

The event showed that collaboration across the organisation is an effective way to speed up innovation and turn ideas into real solutions quickly.

Experts from Finland, the Czech Republic, and Croatia took part in the development event. The teams worked on key business challenges from different angles and quickly built working prototypes from their ideas.

The solutions developed during the hackathon focused on three business areas: marketplaces, media, and job listings. The teams created solutions to speed up and automate job search, personalized recommendation solutions for digital services, AI-based tools for data validation, and new ways to increase user engagement with media content.

“I knew we have talented people, but I understood their true level of expertise when I saw what they built in just two days,” says the owner of the winning idea, Head of Product Development Laura Keskinen.

From idea to concrete and scalable solution

The hackathon ended with presentations where teams demonstrated their solutions to a jury. The jury included leaders from Alma Media’s businesses as well as technology and digital development. The evaluation focused on feasibility, quality of execution, and business value.

The concepts show how quickly an idea can turn into a concrete and scalable solution when a team combines different skills and cross-country collaboration.

According to Alma Media’s Chief Digital Officer Tommi Raivisto, the level was exceptionally high: “The quality of the solutions and presentations exceeded expectations. It was impressive to see how far the teams got in just two days. Some of the solutions were already close to production level.”

Cross-business collaboration builds competitive advantage

The role of AI is growing quickly in all industries. At the same time, the ability of organisations to test, learn, and build new solutions together is becoming more important.

Alma’s AI Hackathon shows that hackathons across business boundaries do not only create new ideas, they also speed up innovation, strengthen collaboration, and help turn development into concrete business value.

“The hackathon was a great example of how quickly AI capabilities can grow in an organization and how strong collaboration across teams can be,” Raivisto continues.

When experts from different roles are brought together, they create solutions that combine technology, business, and user understanding in a new way.

Share article