What are hackathons?
A hackathon is an event that brings people together to turn challenges into possibilities and ideas into outcomes. Over a period of a day to several days, teams explore real-world needs as they share ideas, experiment and build new solutions.
Why host or participate in an AI hackathon with CGI?
We bring together deep technical, industry and domain expertise with a global network of alliances, university and innovative partners. Drawing on our extensive experience designing and supporting hackathons worldwide, we create conditions to support innovation. By connecting the right challenges, talent and technologies, we’re transforming ideas into solutions with real-world impact.
Whether you’re looking to spark innovation within your organization or put your expertise and ideas into action, see what a CGI-hosted hackathon can offer partners, clients and participants.
- Partners and Clients:
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- Turn challenges into prototypes: Explore tailored solutions to real business challenges and rapidly develop ideas into tangible prototypes with interdisciplinary teams.
- Collaborate to discover new possibilities: Bring together diverse perspectives and creative thinking that goes beyond traditional approaches to uncover new solutions.
- Grow talent and strengthen your enterprise brand: Give emerging and existing talent opportunities to learn and build new capabilities while positioning your organization as a forward-thinking place to grow and innovate.
- Accelerate your AI journey: Turn ideas into action faster, whether you’re beginning your AI journey or looking to advance existing initiatives.
- Participants
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- Solve real-world challenges: Put your ideas to work on meaningful business challenges where new perspectives can lead to tangible, real-world impact.
- Bring ideas to life: Go beyond theory and build working prototypes using AI, emerging technologies and state-of-the-art tools and frameworks.
- Make connections that can take you further: Exchange ideas with organizations, experts and like-minded participants while growing your network.
- Learn alongside experienced professionals: Get hands-on guidance from experts throughout the hackathon, from tackling technical questions and shaping your concepts to refining and pitching your solutions.
AI Product Development Challenge with the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers
In partnership with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, CGI hosted an interactive AI Product Development Challenge at Acrisure Stadium (further details below).
Envision Hackathon 2026
As part of CGI Envision 2026, our annual technology event in Asia-Pacific (APAC), teams came together to transform more than 100 ideas into agentic AI solutions (further details below).
AI-Thon 2025
Students from across Germany spent 36 hours building prototypes to solve real-world challenges from six companies (further details below).
One of the fastest ways to drive AI adoption and accelerate innovation is to bring together creative minds, real-world challenges and the opportunity to build. This is exactly what CGI’s AI hackathons and innovation events do. We bring together our AI experts, clients, students, universities and alliance partners to rapidly develop working prototypes using the latest tools and platforms. Our events range from internal innovation sprints to multi-day hackathons.
See individual events for contact information.
- AI-Thon 2.0
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Düsseldorf, Germany
November 27-28, 2026Following last year’s successful debut, this year’s AI-Thon is entering its second edition, supported by AWS and Matrix42. Building on the client challenges, insights and successful projects from last year’s event, teams will develop new AI prototypes and practical solutions. They'll have 36 hours to do so in a secure, GDPR-compliant cloud environment.
- Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Hackathon
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Birkbeck, University of London, England
Throughout August 2026At Birkbeck, teams are reimagining how universities operate by reinventing service delivery rather than simply improving existing services. They are designing and building AI agents to transform student support, IT service desk, service status, staff and student inquires, and staff services. Teams are exploring autonomous workflows, agent orchestration, trusted knowledge, governance, human approval points, and more.
- CGI Envision Hackathon 2026
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India and the Philippines
August 2026As part of CGI Envision 2026, our annual technology event in Asia-Pacific (APAC), teams came together to transform more than 100 ideas into agentic AI solutions. Through rapid development, testing and collaboration, teams took on real-world business challenges, showcasing our engineering skills and ability to turn AI ideas into practical solutions.
- AI Product Development Challenge with the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers
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Pittsburgh Acrisure Stadium, USA
July 2026In partnership with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, CGI hosted an interactive AI Product Development Challenge at Acrisure Stadium, where executives turned real business problems into AI-powered product concepts. Collaborating across business and technology disciplines, they also transformed ideas into AI-powered solutions and pitched their offerings.
- CGI and OpenAI: Public Sector Codex Hackathon
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London, England
July 2026Participants from 18 government agencies used Codex to build solutions for real-world business challenges. The event concluded with a modernization success story, followed by a web-based activity guide and briefing.
Contact: Russell Goodenough, CGI Senior Vice President Consulting Services
- Microsoft Copilot AI Hackathons
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London and Leeds, England; Atlanta and Dallas, USA
June 2026Participants explored Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Azure Agents while developing solutions for real-world scenarios such as operational automation, testing acceleration and community initiatives. Teams also examined the cost implications of selecting advanced versus basic models across both OpenAI and Anthropic platforms, which are supported and accessible through Microsoft Copilot.
- CGI AI Hackathon at the 20th Silicon Saxony Days
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Dresden, Germany
June 15-17, 2026In a technology partnership with AWS, the CGI AI Hackathon brought together people from Silicon Saxony companies, universities, research institutions and CGI to turn concrete business challenges into tangible AI solutions. Over the course of the event, participants combined industry expertise with AI and cloud capabilities in a collaborative setting designed to move quickly from problem definition to proof of concept. Four teams worked in parallel on two distinct real-world use cases: AI-supported approaches to product management and AI-based semiconductor yield analysis aimed at identifying patterns in manufacturing data and uncovering opportunities for improvement.
- Agentic AI Hackathon
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The Netherlands and Germany
June 202612 teams from various CGI locations in The Netherlands and Germany harnessed AI to build complete applications and games in record time. Winning projects ranged from an online multiplayer TRON-like "Gotham Game" to an office-based, local social media platform that helps colleagues connect and meet for breaks, lunches and coffees, to an integrated development environment (IDE) plugin that improves AI prompts and evaluates AI token consumption.
- AI Hackathon
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Hannover, Germany
June 2026Five teams with different backgrounds, such as development-only and manager-only teams, worked to solve the same challenge by implementing the same application. Each team used a different support method while building on a shared foundation of OpenAI Codex.
Contact: Denise Meinecke, CGI Scrum Master and Senior Consultant
- Microsoft Future Ready AI Summit
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Bengaluru, India
June 2026CGI hosted the Microsoft Future Ready AI Summit, bringing together 700 industry leaders, technology enthusiasts and AI practitioners. Through expert keynotes, leadership discussions and interactive sessions, participants explored the latest Microsoft AI innovations, exchanged knowledge and strengthened their connections within the AI community.
- Hackathon for Nature Conservancy of Canada, Endangered Turtles
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Montréal, Québec
May 2, 2026STIM@CGI brought together 36 high school and Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel (CEGEP) students to tackle a practical challenge with real impact. They were asked to reinvent the user experience of carapace.ca—the Nature Conservancy of Canada's platform for reporting and learning about endangered turtles. This event was part of the Journée Technosciences hosted by Cap Campus at the Université de Montréal.
- InnovIA AI Hackathon: CGI, Industrial Alliance, Beneva and Desjardins
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Québec City, Canada
March 14, 2026The first InnovIA hackathon brought together 50 students and three CGI clients—Industrial Alliance, Beneva and Desjardins—to develop AI-enabled solutions for real-world business challenges. Participants explored use cases such as personalized next-best interactions to improve customer satisfaction and retention, and explainable fraud-signal analysis that supports transparency, privacy, human oversight and responsible AI. Teams transformed their ideas into functional prototypes and deliverables during the event.
- CGI Innovation Day: Shark Tank
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Arlington, USA
March 2026CGI's Innovation Day showcased mission-driven AI solutions for US federal government customers, bringing together leaders across governments, academia and industries. The event's centerpiece was a Shark Tank-style competition where five selected teams presented AI-powered proof-of-concept projects targeting federal domains such as national security, citizen services and operational efficiency.
- AI-Thon 2025
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Düsseldorf, Germany
November 21-22, 2025At CGI’s AI-Thon 2025, students from across Germany spent 36 hours building prototypes to solve real-world challenges from six companies. Teams presented their solutions to a jury of experts, with prototypes developed on our technology partner IONOS’s infrastructure, which is GDPR-compliant, high-performing and hosted in Germany.
- Google AI Immersion Days
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Bengaluru, India
September 2025In partnership with Google, CGI hosted a hackathon for CGI Partners to identify and develop industry- and product-driven business and technical use cases to enhance IT operations and create greater value for users. Teams combined our deep domain and industry expertise with practical experience on Google platforms to identify high-value use cases, rapidly develop solutions and put them to the test.
- AI Hackathon: EDF and Google Cloud
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Paris, France
April 2025This hackathon brought together CGI, Assystem and Google Cloud to prototype functional solutions for real-world use cases, including an augmented operator, the analysis of engineering documents and AI-assisted visual detection. Participants presented their prototypes were presented to a jury composed of Électricité de France (EDF) CIOs, who selected the winner based on criteria including technical proficiency, feasibility, responsible use of AI and value creation for EDF.
AI hackathons are often a starting point or accelerator for broader business outcomes and transformations.
Combining our client proximity model with global scale, we help organizations across their AI journey to:
- Define their AI strategies to align with business priorities.
- Identify ROI-driven use cases to deliver tangible outcomes.
- Build future-ready and adaptive AI foundations to support evolving enterprise needs.
- Scale AI responsibly to accelerate measurable value.
Learn more about our AI expertise, capabilities and thought leadership.
