Every year, our business technology (BT) team hosts a highly-anticipated internal hackathon.
It brings teams of various sizes together to brainstorm and implement creative and powerful automation solutions with Workato that could help our clients, partners, and ourselves.
Like our previous hackathon, this year’s event attracted hundreds of participants. And, just as exciting, many came from less technical backgrounds than that of a “traditional” automation builder. For example, 50% of our administration team participated, while 45% of our legal team partook.
To help guide participating teams, BT offered up the following awards:
- Biggest Value for Customers
- Most Creative
- Best Use Case for AI
- Best Hack Overall
- Most innovative
- Biggest Value for Internal Use
We’ll give you a sense of the creative automation solutions our teams built by spotlighting the winning submissions below.
Best Use Case for AI: Team Isabelle
Our recipe interface is intuitive and easy to follow for employees of all backgrounds. That said, for employees who aren’t involved in designing and implementing a given automation, the process of understanding it thoroughly can take a bit of time.
To help any employee understand an automation faster, Isabelle Leong, an Automation Consultant, Abhishek Bhattacherjee, a Customer Centric Engineer, Andrew Putra, a Solutions Consultant, and Vignesh Rajan, a Senior Solutions Consultant, built an automation with Workato that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to document recipes.
Here’s a closer look at how it works:
1. An employee accesses a Workflow App, “Chronicler”, and fills out a form to generate documentation for a specific recipe. Once the form gets submitted, the automation is triggered.
2. The employee can access the ChatGPT-created documentation in Chronicler, make any edits, if necessary, and then click “Sync to Confluence”.
3. A new page in Confluence gets created, which includes the documentation and the URL to the recipe in Workato.
4. Once the task is marked as done in Chronicler, Workbot® shares the documentation with specific employees in Slack, along with a link to the newly-created page in Confluence.
Related: How to implement AI-powered automations
Biggest Value for Internal Use: M.F.J.P
Here at Workato, we host dozens of events every quarter, each of which requires performing a variety of error-prone, mundane tasks that take a number of hours to complete.
To address this, a few of our team members—Miranda Yeo, a Sr. Marketing Manager, Floyd Santos, a Marketing Operations Manager, Jia Ping Lee, a Business Systems Analyst, and Prapim Chutaprutikorn, a Lead Designer—came together to implement a customized Workbot, dubbed “EventBot”.
Here’s how it works:
An employee accesses EventBot in Slack, where they can create a new event. This triggers a modal to appear, where the employee can enter in information like the name of the event, its date, and the region it’s hosted in. Once submitted, an associated Marketo campaign gets added, an event kit is populated, email invite templates are created, and more.
EventBot can also perform additional tasks, like automatically creating name tags with a few clicks, sending email invitations to employees once they’ve signed up for an event, and automatically uploading the event’s recording to Youtube.
Biggest Value for Customers: Ocean Pacific Peace
As your go-to-market teams engage with prospects and clients from around the globe, they might need certain slide decks translated to specific languages. And while this could, in theory, be done manually, doing so would take countless time for your team, which they could otherwise spend on more valuable activities.
To tackle this head on, Amlan Debnath, our Managing Director in APJ, Alvin Ee, a Business Operations Manager, and Tomomichi Noguchi, an Automation Consultant, updgraded our existing Workbot, “DeckBot”, and named the new version “DeckBot v2”.
Here’s DeckBot v2 in action:
An employee accesses DeckBot v2 in Slack, where they can select the specific deck they’re looking to translate, the translated information they need in the deck, the customer it’s for, and the language they need to translate it to.
Once submitted, DeckBot v2 shares the translated deck with the requestor in a matter of seconds.
And, in case the employee wants to confirm that the translated version is accurate (since the bot uses Google Translate), the employee can access a task within a verification portal—built on Workato’s Workflow Apps—to review the slides.
Once they review the slides and make any edits, they can confirm that the slides are correct within the task and click “Verified”. This triggers the bot to upload the slide deck to HighSpot so that other employees can also access it.
Most Creative: GastPedal
As sales reps engage with a variety of prospects every day, it can become difficult to adequately prepare for each call.
To help make it easier, a few of our GTM employees—Josh Lucas, our Head of GTM Automation Solutions, Viet Huynh, a RevOps Solutions Manager, Tyler Lawson, our Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics, and Siavash Mojarrad, a Sales Manager—designed the following automation:
1. Once a sales rep schedules a meeting invite, the automation gets triggered.
2. For any non-Workato email address, Workato will search for the contact on Linkedin and our CRM.
3. An additional invite gets created for the rep at the same time as their call with the contact(s); the additional invite includes a link to each contact’s profile on Linkedin as well as their page(s) in our CRM.
Most Innovative: The Wizard
To help our customers implement impactful automations quickly, we’ve launched a variety of pre-built solutions called Accelerators.
The process of accessing and setting up Accelerators within a Workspace, while not tedious, does involve a few steps on the client’s end. To streamline these steps and simplify the process of leveraging them, Jasper Madrone, our GTM Enterprise Architect, built the following:
Once a client fills out and submits a form—built in Workato’s Workflow Apps— with all of the information necessary to provision the accelerator, the automation gets triggered. The assets from the Accelerator get created and authorized in their Workspace (e.g. connections), and the recipe automatically gets started.
Best Hack Overall: Did you put your name into the Goblet of Fire, Harry?” he asked calmly.
Hosting marketing events successfully not only requires you to complete a number of tasks in advance, but also shortly after the event takes place.
Our team of Elisa Park, a Sr. Manager of Demand Generation, Brandon Chew, our Pre & Post Sales Enablement Manager, Livingston Chaffee, a Sr. Strategic AE, and Sejal Agrawal, an Enterprise Events & Field Marketing Manager, accounted for each possible step across different types of events and automated nearly everything with Workato.
Here’s more:
An employee can fill out a form in a Workflow App that includes all of the key details on the event (name, date, description, etc.). Once submitted, the workflow gets triggered: A program for the event gets created in Marketo, the webinar gets scheduled in Zoom, the appropriate sequences get added in Outreach, a campaign gets created in Salesforce, and an event kit gets populated in Google Drive.
Once the event ends, a few additional automations get triggered.
A slide deck gets created that summarizes the event according to key information, such as the number of prospects and clients that attended, the breakdown of organizations that were represented according to size (e.g. Enterprise), etc. And, if leads attended, an AE also receives a Slack notification via a customized Workbot, which they can assign to an SDR with the click of a button; all the while, that lead is added to the appropriate Outreach sequence so that they’re followed-up with quickly.
Final thoughts
While we’re proud of the submissions above, we’re equally proud of the other automation solutions our teams presented. Moreover, similar to last year’s hackathon, the event highlighted the fact that anyone can use Workato to build innovative, impactful automations, quickly.
Wondering what you can build with Workato?
Schedule a demo with one of our automation experts to ideate and pinpoint the most impactful automations you can implement.
