Our first AI hackathon at billiger-mietwagen.de
Why AI is not an IT project — and what one day with the whole team produces in usable solutions.
Björn Jopen · Partner
In early May we took over billiger-mietwagen.de from ProSiebenSat.1 and have been working intensively on the transformation since. One of the decisive questions: how do processes become simpler, faster and more scalable? AI is one of the most effective answers today — as long as it is not set up as an IT project.
So we brought the entire German team together: one day, an introduction to modern AI workflows, five interdisciplinary teams working on real problems from their own working days.
What came out of a single day
Within a few hours this produced not only prototypes but, in part, directly usable solutions:
- Automating financial accounting — a quarterly process cut from 20 hours to 2
- AI-supported management reports in customer service, bringing together data from different sources and flagging anomalies
- Automated maintenance of help centre content and customer communication
- An end-to-end B2B process — from the landing page to automated invoicing
- Automating the Braze campaigns — from the first idea to the approved campaign
What impressed us was not the technology but the pace at which colleagues from finance, marketing, product, tech and customer service rethought their daily processes entirely.
Three takeaways
Cross-functional beats specialised. Different perspectives mean problems are understood better and solutions thought through more completely.
The best use cases do not come from management. Employees know their own processes best — and take ownership when given the room to do so.
A hackathon creates momentum, not just ideas. Discussions turn into concrete projects, and suggestions for improvement into actual implementation.