Innovation Highlights: Ardoq’s 2026 AI Hackathon

This February at Ardoq's hackathon, we traded incremental updates for radical rethinking. 2026's edition was designed to challenge our approach to Enterprise Architecture (EA). The goal was to give our people the freedom to think big and innovate toward a future where AI radically reshapes how organizations solve complex problems.

Our teams spent two intensive days building prototypes that won’t just influence our roadmap but have the potential to radically change the EA space.

​​"I hope people will be bold about going outside their comfort zone and try to use more of the new tools and the new ways of working and not think so much about how things work on a day-to-day basis but really try to think of what we're trying to solve."
- Jarand Narbuvold, Director of AI

Check out the highlights from the floor:

Ardoq’s POV for AI-Native Engineering: Empowering Every Team Equally and Consistently

A highly specialized internal AI team formed the foundation that enables all other teams to quickly iterate and experiment with AI-powered features, not just for the hackathon but for everyday, ongoing innovation. This ensures everyone has the same toolkit and launchpad, allowing them to focus entirely on solving customer problems instead of the plumbing of LLMs or vector databases.

This foundation has three components:

1. Core AI Building Blocks: Including foundation models, hosting infrastructure, standards, and governance.
2. Shared Services: This includes standard ways of running LLMs, orchestrating prompts, ensuring data privacy and governance as well as evaluation frameworks to track accuracy, hallucination, and bias.
3. Support Tools: A toolkit that includes AI UI components, an auto-documentation helper to accelerate the generation of descriptions, labels, and tooltips for new features, and a report summarizer module widget that they could use to create natural language summaries of any dataset.

This shared infrastructure meant that we saw teams move from a "What if?" conversation to a working proof-of-concept in just 48 hours.

Hackathon Themes: Reimagining the EA Experience

The hackathon ended up centering on three transformative themes that define the future of EA:

1. Eliminating the Manual Tax

Enterprise Architecture has a reputation for being slow and manual. We explored how AI can handle the heavy lifting—from smart data ingestion that cleans as it climbs, to automating the maintenance of application inventories. The goal is to ensure your architecture reflects reality, not last quarter’s spreadsheet.

2. Democratizing Insights

We focused on breaking the bottleneck that EA teams so often find themselves becoming. We prototyped ways for business stakeholders—like CIOs or Finance leads—to interact with architecture data using natural language. Imagine getting a presentation-ready impact analysis just by asking a question, no translation required.

3. Agentic Problem Solving

We pushed the boundaries of agentic workflows, where multiple AI agents collaborate to solve complex tasks. Whether it’s flagging cross-domain security risks or simulating "what-if" scenarios for cost optimization, we’re building AI that doesn't just describe the enterprise—it helps you navigate it.

"We were trying to break problems into pieces using a sub-agent concept. We realized that sometimes you need a single agent to write a piece of code, and other times you need a squad. Just being creative and thinking out of the box is the only way to solve these 'messy' architectural challenges."
- Mario Ek Aparicio, Principal Product Manager

Why Hackathons Matter

Why do we pause regular work for this? Because "Bold" and "Driven" are part of our DNA. Hackathons have long been part of how we iterate, innovate, and create an ever-better platform. They ensure we have an opportunity outside the everyday to reframe how we approach ideas and challenges our customers face, big and small. Of the prototypes developed, we distill a few to bring to life. Our future-state modeling functionality, Scenarios, is one example of the great ideas that began as seeds at a hackathon.

• A Culture of Experimentation: It gives our people permission to fail fast and learn faster.
• Cross-Pollination: We had cross-functional teams collaborating. This ensures our innovation is grounded in real-world business value, not just cool tech.
• Seeding the Roadmap: Many of the "wild ideas" from previous hackathons are now core parts of the Ardoq platform.

"It's exciting to be able to work in a completely different way and have allocated time to actually prototype. Getting tips on how you could 'hack' things in the spirit of a hackathon has been super exciting. It’s surprising how accessible the code could be once we had a structure to work with."
- Agnethe Holt, Product Designer

Awards and Learning Points

The Hackathon concluded with a ceremony recognizing the projects best embodied our vision for a "Smarter Way to EA."

• The Most Production-Ready Award: Given to the team whose solution was technically sound and ready to survive a real-world product backlog.
• The Most Innovative Award: Awarded to the project that most radically challenged the status quo of how enterprise architecture is practiced.
• The Overall Grand Prize: The top honor for the project that best balanced technical feasibility with massive business value.

Beyond the trophies, the real takeaway was the speed of innovation. Many teams delivered proof-of-concept features in just 48 hours. This event proved that when we give our people the right tools to experiment, we move closer to an era where architecture isn't just documented—it's lived.

See What’s Next

The mindset seeded during these two days will directly influence our product strategy as we continue to build the digital twin of the organization.

Check out Ardoq Labs to see our latest experiments and AI-first features.