IBM, Microsoft hackathon shows businesses can build agentic AI systems for immediate impact

This article was written with contributions from Narayanan Alampallam, Director, Global Partner Development, Microsoft, and Srinivasan Venkatarajan, Director, Global Partner Business (Data & AI), Microsoft.

Can agentic AI use cases be turned into real-world solutions? More than 900 participants think so.

IBM Consulting and Microsoft hosted their third annual hackathon with both clients and IBM teams participating this past spring. The focus this year: agentic AI. With expertise from IBM Consulting and Microsoft, the hackathon provided an opportunity for organizations to build a specific use case, experiment, and develop a truly innovative AI-powered solution, ready to deliver business value.

Across industries, it’s clear that many business leaders have turned their focus—and investments—to AI agents. This year’s IBM Institute for Business Value global CEO study revealed 61% of CEOs say they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale. However, organizations struggle with building the talent, prioritizing use cases, and testing the capabilities and governance.

Recognizing these challenges, IBM Consulting and Microsoft designed the hackathon to provide participants with the technologies, expertise, structured experimentation environment and hands-on support needed to overcome these development and implementation barriers.

“It was important for our department to use the hackathon, and the expertise of IBM Consulting and Microsoft, to explore how AI and automation could boost the efficiency of our mobile workforce,” said John Harrison, Director of IT, State of New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, which developed one of the winning solutions, “Checkmate.”

In partnership with IBM, the client created Checkmate to address the challenge of traditional data entry for the State of New Jersey Department of Community Affairs’ mobile workforce, such as code enforcement inspectors that promote public safety. The solution used a series of AI agents built with Microsoft Azure AI and integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) and Power Automate.

Checkmate showed how users could capture and share real-time findings more efficiently while ensuring timely follow-up actions. The solution allows conversational interaction between public safety inspectors and generative AI using speech-to-text functionality. During these interactions, Checkmate will take the spoken input from the inspectors and analyze it against code book text and other data elements to recommend citations or other courses of action. Once the inspection is complete, the agentic AI elements, like intent and context recognition, will create the inspection record in D365 for the inspector.

Overall, Checkmate aims to boost the efficiency of employees in the field, support better compliance across the department while reducing human errors, make the inspection process more efficient, and in sum, promote public safety. “The AI-powered solution will not only integrate across our technology stack to improve our day-to-day business processes, but it also supports better compliance, reduces manual errors and enables our team to work smarter and take faster action on their findings,” said Harrison.

Another winning project came from the State of Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) and focused on creating an agentic AI solution to help transform child welfare services and to better respond to the needs of the families they serve. Leveraging Microsoft’s AI stack, the team’s solution aims to improve the department’s service identification, tracking and submission processes to enhance the accuracy of their reporting and help ensure reliable service records. Reliable reporting and service records are key to help support case workers’ decision-making and help the department secure and maximize critical funding based on accurate tracking of community-based services.

“The IBM Consulting team helped us implement key Microsoft generative AI solutions that have significantly improved the efficiency of caseworkers, enabling them to focus on what really matters—helping families,” said Frank Sweeney, Chief Information Officer, State of Arizona Department of Child Services.

This year’s hackathon welcomed more than 900 participants—a record-high compared to previous years, with 225 hackathon teams spanning clients from 25 different countries across industries including consumer packaged goods, retail and fashion, healthcare, hospitality, industrial and manufacturing, and state and local governments. At the end of the eight-week event, more than 200 prototype solutions were submitted for judging from a panel of IBM and Microsoft experts.

“The IBM–Microsoft Agentic AI Hackathon showcases how agentic AI, combined with deep industry collaboration and the power Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, enables rapid experimentation, proof of value, while paving way for scalable solutions that address real-world business needs,” said Piyush Mangalick, Vice President and Head of CoreAI Applied Engineering at Microsoft.

In addition to clients, global IBM employee teams also participated in this year’s hackathon to develop their own unique agentic AI solutions. The winning IBM teams utilized Microsoft’s agentic AI tools and services to build solutions that addressed business needs such as transforming banking operations, optimizing supply chain production and planning, and creating an intelligent digital advisor for consumer shopping experiences, with each solution having the potential to be scaled as a repeatable asset for clients.

“The collective knowledge and asset growth we witnessed and harnessed is massive,” Sumeet Parashar, Associate Partner and AI Integration Offering Leader for IBM Consulting, wrote in a LinkedIn post. Participants “[tested] the limits of technology, building patterns and code assets for use cases, AI governance and every aspect of AI adoption.”

IBM Consulting’s Microsoft practice is built on a multi-year partnership aimed at delivering business outcomes for clients navigating complex AI, cloud and security transformations. IBM has more than 33,000 Microsoft-certified professionals who are augmented by the capabilities in our AI-powered delivery platform, IBM Consulting Advantage, to deliver better and faster value for clients.

Join the IBM Consulting and Microsoft teams, as well as an agentic AI hackathon winner, to discuss their use case, development processes and resulting solution—watch on demand.

To learn more about how IBM Consulting and Microsoft are working together visit: www.ibm.com/consulting/microsoft.