How They Built AI Agents in 3.5 Hours: The First “Building AI Agents with InterSystems” Hackathon at READY 2026
At READY 2026, for the very first time, we held a customer hackathon — and it was an amazing experience!
The hackathon took place on the pre-event day at 9 am. Some participants, like me, arrived early due to jet lag—but that actually helped us connect with fellow hackers before the event kicked off.
The Beginning
@Dean Andrews Dean Andrews welcomed everyone by noting that all participants were pioneers in two ways: first, because this was our first-ever hackathon at our annual tech conference; and second, because everyone in the room was among the first to get hands-on with our new InterSystems AI Hub (even before the official announcement!).
@Gabriel Ing Gabriel Ing led the technical workshop, explaining how and why to use agents, what resources were available, how to get started, and showcasing a great demo.
@Olga Zavrazhnova provided guidance on how to approach the hackathon and walked participants through the key stages: brainstorming ideas, pitching, judging, and awards.
And then the magic began. It was a challenging task—diving into the agentic world and building a project in just 3.5 hours! The teams were newly formed, and most members hadn’t met before the event. It was amazing to watch how they quickly came together—brainstorming, laughing, and coding.
50 people, 10 teams, 10 projects, and 3.5 hours of hacking—and they delivered brilliantly.
Of course, you can’t fully polish a project in that timeframe, and not everything works perfectly. But every team had something running, learned how to work with agents, and many explored agentic tools.
Pitching and Judging:
The teams had 3,5 min to pitch their project and 1,5 min for questions:
Winners
We couldn’t emphasise enough that every single participant was already a winner. Within such a short time, everyone gained hands-on experience building AI agents, made new connections, and learned something new—that was the true goal of the hackathon.
Every participant received Global Masters points. However, a competition is a competition, right? After a brief deliberation and review of the project code, our judges selected three winners:
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1st place - Team 4  |
2nd place - Team 6  |
3rd place - Team 8
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AI Hub was officially announced at READY 2026, and you can access it through the Early Access Program.
We hope to see you at our future events!
Big thank you to our on-site technical mentors, who helped the teams make faster progress: @Thomas Dyar , @Gabriel Ing , @David McCaldon , @Elie Eshoa, @Georgia Dimaki , @Minhao Li , @Nick Petrocelli , Marta Manzin, @Rob Costa, @Patrick Sulin, @Vishal Pallerla , our judges @Dean Andrews, @Jeff Fried , and @Tom Woodfin.