Mar 30, 2025

Doug English, Culture Amp's chief technology officer and founder. Source: Supplied Hackathons surged in popularity during the mid-2000s and while they may not be as widespread today, one of Australia’s biggest tech success stories has used the concept with gusto, enabling employees to get a handle on the possibilities of AI tech. Engineers, product managers and designers at employee experience platform, Culture Amp, took a two-day break from their normal jobs in February for a hackathon in Melbourne focused on AI. Software engineers, including juniors from the company’s ongoing grad program, were involved in the codefest, with the aim to help build relationships and skills across teams, foster creative problem-solving, and improve ways of working. Back to basics “It was quite the craze for all the tech companies to run hackathons. It’s less common these days, but we felt it was actually a fantastic way to focus everyone on the learning and development upskilling that we needed in the AI space, and it proved to be a fantastic format for that,” said Doug English, Culture Amp’s chief technology officer and founder. Founded in 2009 in Melbourne, Culture Amp has grown to become a global leader in employee analytics with a customer base that includes McDonald’s, Canva and Coles. The company’s software helps organisations measure and improve staff feedback, creating a more positive and productive workplace culture. While Culture Amp has been using AI in its platform for about six years, it required the work of deep AI experts to build bespoke models for certain tasks and analysis. But with the “incredible” pace of AI, large language models (LLMs) – AI systems capable of understanding and generating human language by processing vast amounts of text data – have helped make the tasks more accessible for more engineers. “Now that the LLMs are here, there’s so much that is possible and can be done much faster and easier than it was in the past – we don’t need to build our own models,” English explains. “We will continue to have deep specialists in certain teams building the really core complex AI components – but we wanted all of our engineers to have the skills to do prompt engineering and build some of the more simpler AI capabilities. Hackathon helps build new solution “It’s just a totally new skill set for our engineers to learn, and it’s a very different way of coding.” The recent hackathon was intended to help bridge the skills gap when it comes to AI. “It’s so new that none of the universities have really even had the opportunity to teach a lot of the techniques,” English says. “It’s all moving so fast that we really do require engineers to be learning on the job. (The skills gap) is very large and we needed to find ways to create opportunities for them to learn how to move forward in the space.” In early hackathon success, a solution built by one of the Culture Amp teams has already been implemented, helping engineers understand where their coding needs to be improved. AI is also opening up the possibility of doing things in ways that in the past weren’t practical, according to Culture Amp director of engineering enablement, Paul Hughes. For example, while Culture Amp’s employee surveys which yield thousands of comments are not practical for a human to read through and digest, the LLM can interpret the data and provide readable text, capturing the main points. “We see those opportunities in the product, and see it with our engineers, because they can now talk to the LLM, and it’s like an assistant to them,” Hughes adds. “While they’re writing the code, they’re saying to this assistant – just like they would say to a junior engineer – ‘Hey, can you give me advice on this? And how should I think about building this feature, or what other things could we think about?’ And the AI will respond and give you that kind of assistance. “I think the opportunities are still largely untapped and we’re all discovering them as we go forward.” For Hughes, it is “extremely important” for software engineers and new graduates to get up to speed with the AI tech used by businesses today. AI a great ‘equaliser’ And while the hackathon may be over, the AI learnings will be ongoing, with the tools and synthesised data set up for the event remaining in place so teams can experiment with an idea at any time. “AI is able to help you as a developer be more productive, be a thought partner, think about things in different ways, and more quickly come up with ideas. If you’re not using an AI, the person that is using it is going to outperform you over time,” Hughes says. “They’re also going to be able to build more sophisticated things using AI than they could before.” For new graduates, there is also the opportunity to become deep experts very early in their careers. “AI is so different to the way software has traditionally been built,” English adds. “In some ways, AI has become quite an equaliser for our engineers, where everyone’s learning the same thing at the same time. “In a lot of ways, our more senior software engineers got to unlearn a bunch of ways that they used to work, while our graduates have the opportunity to start afresh with the new approaches and ideas.” Software engineer Renee Bibby was among 10 graduates to start with Culture Amp this year. Her hackathon team used AI to summarise work-based conversations shared by staff members on Slack. The task saved valuable hours that ordinarily would have been used summarising and manually typing up the dialogue. “You can redirect that time into working on more complex problems, or, actually doing the problem-solving side of things as well,” she says. She has relished being able to learn about AI alongside senior engineers who are also discovering its possibilities. “It’s a really interesting time at the moment. It’s probably one of the rare opportunities you get to be actively learning with peers more senior to you, which is really cool. And it also gives you such a good opportunity to get deep into it very quickly.” Never miss a story: sign up to SmartCompany’s  free daily newsletter  and find our best stories on  LinkedIn . About the author