We Ran Our Own AI Agents Hackathon – Here’s What Happened
Last week, the Forward Forever team flew to Budapest for a full-day AI agents hackathon, organized entirely by us, for us.
The day started with everyone in the same room, which was already half the point. We’re a team that’s often heads-down on client work with a flexible way of working, so getting everyone together in one place had its own energy. Budapest helped too.
What’s a Hackathon, Exactly?
A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid, collaborative development over a short period of time, typically a day. The goal isn’t to ship a finished product; it’s to explore, test and learn fast. At ours, each group had the freedom to spend a full day on something new that could have real value for us, or for our customers. The output could be a working prototype, a proof-of-concept, a set of architecture recommendations or simply a clear map of what’s possible and what isn’t yet.
This is also something we run for our customers. Our hackathon was designed and facilitated by Mikko Koskinen, our AI & Copilot lead, and Tiago Neves, Power Platform Advisor. If you’re curious about what AI agents could do for a specific part of your business, a hackathon is one of the fastest ways to find out with real hands-on learning rather than a slide deck full of promises.
How Ours Worked
We split into five groups, each tackling an AI agent challenge tied to real-world scenarios we care about: analytics, app development, service delivery, knowledge management and CRM. The brief: explore, build, document what you learned.
By end of day, every group had something to show.
Hackathons like this are less about building finished solutions and more about creating the moment where people start seeing their work differently.
The Groups
Power BI Agentic Development (Fabric + Agent Integration)
This group explored how AI agents can assist in building, managing and governing Power BI and Microsoft Fabric solutions — think agent-driven analytics development, automated Fabric administration, and practical patterns for making data work smarter with less manual overhead.
Agent Capabilities in Power Apps & Code Apps
How does AI change the way you actually build applications? This group investigated AI-assisted app creation with both Power Apps and code-first approaches, looking at how agentic capabilities are reshaping what modern business application delivery looks like, and how fast it can move.
Copilot Studio & Agent Development Framework
This group worked with how Forward Forever should design and build AI agents going forward. Using Copilot Studio and related agent technologies, this group worked through real support and service scenarios to establish practical architecture patterns, orchestration approaches and instruction design, the kind of framework that makes future agent projects faster and more consistent.
Project Knowledge & Documentation AI
A pain point almost every project team knows: finding the right information at the right time and keeping documentation from going stale. This group explored how AI can improve knowledge retrieval, documentation creation and day-to-day project information management — practical patterns for capturing, structuring, and actually using project knowledge across delivery work.
Service Intelligence & CRM Agent
This group explored what AI agents can actually deliver with CRM, sales, and service data. The focus was on investigating the out-of-the-box Sales Agent capabilities in M365 and Dynamics, identifying where the gaps are, and building the necessary custom extensions — connecting Teams conversations, calendar data and internal activity into something that gives real, contextual answers rather than generic ones.
What We Took Away
A few things were consistent across all five groups.
The out-of-the-box tools are improving fast but the wins come when you connect them to your own data, your own processes and your own context. That’s where Copilot Studio and custom agent work start to shine.
We also came away with something more tangible: shared architecture patterns, identified governance considerations and a handful of ideas that could evolve into internal accelerators or new customer offerings.
The day wasn’t just exploration, it fed directly into how we approach agent development going forward.
The real value wasn’t just learning new AI tools. It was helping experienced professionals realize that the way we build solutions is starting to change.
And the other thing? Getting everyone in the same room actually matters. Ideas traveled faster, problems got unstuck quicker and there’s something about watching a colleague crack a prompt that makes the whole thing click for you too.
The work doesn’t stop here. The prototypes, patterns, and ideas from the day feed straight into how we develop our AI agent capabilities going forward.
Unlock Your Team’s AI Potential
Forward Forever is a Microsoft Solutions Partner specialising in Power Platform and AI-driven transformation. We work with teams to turn AI from a buzzword into a business advantage through practical solutions, expert guidance and real hands-on experience.
Interested in running an AI hackathon with your team? Get in touch — we’d love to work with you.