At Cloudforce, we believe many of the best ideas for AI innovation are already inside the building, they just need the right space to come to life. In alignment with Microsoft’s push for partners to lead the way as “Frontier Firms,” our leadership wasted no time in being intentional about creating the space and stage for every team member to truly “embody the frontier”.
Recently, we launched our second internal hackathon as part of our ongoing efforts to bring people together across departments, sharpen our ideas, and push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and the tools we leverage (and build) every day on the Microsoft cloud.
This time around, cross-functional teams took on real internal challenges, blending diverse perspectives and skill sets to design solutions that none of them could have built alone. The creativity, collaboration, and technical ambition on display reminded us why these events matter, not just for the products that come out of them, but for the culture of experimentation they reinforce.
Ten teams. Dozens of ideas. One common thread: using AI to make Cloudforce smarter, faster, and better for everyone who works here.
The hackathon didn’t start with code; it started with a question: where could an AI agent make the biggest impact for Cloudforce today?
From there, cross-departmental teams were assembled, intentionally mixing skill sets and perspectives to spark the kind of collaboration that doesn’t always happen in day-to-day work. Teams presented a wide range of ideas, from an agent supporting new hires, to a marketing agent predicting LinkedIn post-performance, to an agent that quickly crafts new customer solutions based on past deliverables.
With their concepts locked in, each group had a full month to build. That meant designing their agents, testing them, and tweaking them as needed to ensure everything worked safely and reliably. No shortcuts, just real development and real User Acceptance Testingesting (UAT) — just like we would approach any customer-facing project.
At the final presentation day, the stakes were raised. Teams didn’t just present their work, they ran live and interactive demos in front of a panel of our exec judges, showing exactly what their agents could do with real data, in real time. The results speak for themselves.
🥇 First Place — Hack to the Future
Their Build: Orbiting 8gent
Brian Dreyer, Indervir Singh, Timothy Wells, Garrett Broady, Yessica Prudencio, and Bruce Li didn’t just build a product, they reimagined how Cloudforce employees learn. Orbiting 8gent transforms the intensive two-week nebulaONE and Cloudforce training into an interactive, adaptive learning experience powered by AI.
Think of it as your personal AI instructor: it starts by gauging your existing knowledge, then tailors its teaching style to meet you exactly where you are. Whether you prefer quizzes, flashcards, or guided lessons, Orbiting 8gent adapts. It walks users through AI terminology, prompt creation, and even agent building on nebulaONE, making it equally valuable for new hires and seasoned employees alike.
🥈 Second Place — Frontier Feeds
Their Build: Frontier Feeds
Anna Shukham, William Casas, Akbar Sattar, Cassidy Rhodes, Gin Meizys, and Aylin Alptekin built a solution for a challenge every one of us faces: staying current on AI developments without it becoming a full-time job. Frontier Feeds is a customizable AI news feed delivered directly into Microsoft Teams channels on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence.
No more hunting through newsletters or missing critical industry shifts. Frontier Feeds brings short, relevant, and curated AI insights to where people already work. Designed for both internal employees and clients, it ensures everyone stays informed, aligned, and confidently moving on the frontier of AI.
🥉 Third Place — Binary Legends
Their Build: Azure MCP Connector for N1
Querida Escalera, Paul Higgins, Ryland DeGregory, Marissa Lillian Morales, David Spiegel, and Jorge Rivero tackled one of the most technically ambitious challenges of the hackathon: intelligent Azure operations monitoring for nebulaONE. Their Azure MCP Connector acts as an intelligent operator, continuously monitoring and analyzing the Azure resources that power nebulaONE.
The agent securely accesses Log Analytics and Application Insights to retrieve logs, correlate signals, detect anomalies, and explain failures in plain language. Beyond ops, it surfaces token consumption, usage trends, and cost drivers tied to AI workloads, making it easier to track and optimize spend.
Every team that competed deserves recognition. Here’s a look at the different solutions built during this hackathon.
ONEsource
Matt Day, Tara Basuik, Liza Ballinger, Vandana Verma, and Collin Globig built ONEsource, Cloudforce’s unified customer intelligence assistant for nebulaONE. It pulls together data from HubSpot, Gong, and ServiceNow into a single, readable view, giving teams consolidated visibility into customer activity, relationship health, recent interactions, open support issues, and recommended next steps. Whether you’re prepping for a meeting or assessing account risk, ONEsource has you covered.
Bowser
Emily Coston, Zach Ebner, Luke Burger, Jasmin Atienza, James Cox, and Michelle Townsend also tackled the customer intelligence space, building a nebulaONE-powered assistant that unifies HubSpot, Gong, and ServiceNow data to give account teams a complete, at-a-glance picture of every customer relationship, from conversation history to open tickets to recommended next steps.
M12
Ananya Khanna, Caroline Chu, Daud Ibrahim, Indigo Emannuel, Jake Stapleton, and Ylang Ylang Taitt-Thompson built Cloudforce’s Software Support Agent, your friendly first line of defense for IT and software issues. Whether it’s ClickUp, GitHub, Figma, Jira, or any other tool in our stack, the agent asks targeted questions, connects with platform specialists behind the scenes, and explains solutions in clear, approachable language. If the first answer doesn’t work, it keeps digging until you’re back up and running.
Rascally Rabbits
Ed Hankin, Michael Bost, Mariana Taitano, Reece Herberg, and Elijah Carrington built the Mighty Marketing Agent, Cloudforce marketing’s intelligent front door. It routes requests to the right specialist agent, whether you need content and messaging recommendations, engagement predictions and forecasting, or cross-channel campaign performance insights. One entry point. The right answer, every time.
The Cloud Cadets
Angela Latson, Mark, William Casas, Sarah Steil, Sean Welling, and Nicole Jordan introduced C.A.R.L. (Cloudforce Assistant for Resources & Learning), a retro-inspired internal wiki buddy that helps employees, especially new hires, find accurate answers by searching and summarizing Confluence documentation, then pointing directly to the source pages. Culture questions, onboarding guides, SOPs, runbooks, C.A.R.L. has it. HR questions? He’ll route you to S.A.M. (Staff Assistance & Mentoring). No flux capacitor required.
FrontierONE
Elissa Ponniah, Janna Maddox, Quinn Hayden, Ijeoma Ezeonyebuchi, Rhoddy McKown, and Arija Rahman built an intelligent QuickBooks Time assistant that takes the guesswork out of time logging. It reinforces core rules, guides employees to the right customer and project codes, helps classify billable vs. non-billable activities, and navigates the nuances of nebulaONE R&D vs. client-specific work, all in plain language. For anyone who’s ever stared at a timesheet wondering what code to use, this one’s for you.
The Brandi Bunch
Raul Prudencio, Scott Fiore, Noah Abbott, David Spiegel, Chris Maski, and Brandi Francis built Cloudforce’s instant source of truth for historical use cases. Their agent has direct access to the full library of solutions Cloudforce has deployed across client institutions and can surface them in seconds. Need to know if we’ve built anything for IT help desk automation? Curious what we’ve done for a specific client or sector? Want to see all use cases involving multi-agent workflows? This agent finds it, fast.
This hackathon wasn’t just about prototypes or prizes, it was a glimpse into the future of how we work (although the prizes for the winning teams were pretty epic).
Every agent built, every workflow reimagined, and every problem tackled reflects Cloudforce’s commitment to becoming a true frontier force: human led, agent powered, and continuously learning. By empowering employees to experiment with AI, apply it to real business challenges, and share what they learn across the organization, we’re demonstrating Frontier Leadership by example and acting as “Customer Zero” before we pitch agents to our clients.
Becoming a frontier force isn’t about adopting tools for the sake of novelty. It’s about building practical systems that accelerate knowledge, improve decision making, and free people to focus on higher impact work.
As Cloudforce continues the frontier journey, initiatives like our internal hackathons will remain a critical part of how we learn, evolve, and lead, not just to remain on the bleeding edge of AI internally, but to help our customers rethink how their organizations should be designed to operate in the future.
And if this event was any indication, the frontier isn’t ahead of us.
We’re already building it.
Driven by a passion for people, Reece thrives on fostering relationships and building community through creative and personable campaigns. As a self-proclaimed B2B marketing nerd, Reece believes in a human-centered approach that helps organizations unlock their full potential by first understanding their needs. From hosting educational events to creating impactful collateral to forming strategic partnerships, her upbeat and energetic personality makes her a natural connector in any environment she enters. Her marketing philosophy is that any long-term meaningful strategy needs to begin with a conversation.
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