More than 300 engineers from six centres competed at Zentrova Hackathon 2026, and three outstanding AI ideas were selected for development into commercial products.
Over the weekend of 14–16 August 2026, the eighth Zentrova Hackathon took place simultaneously in Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City, with colleagues in Tokyo, Singapore and Munich joining online. Under the theme “AI for real work”, the event drew 62 teams and more than 300 engineers, designers and business analysts.
The rules
Each team had 48 hours to turn a genuine problem, faced either by a client or by Zentrova itself, into a working product. Teams were given access to the internal large language model platform, an anonymised sample data lake and a Kubernetes sandbox. A jury of engineering leaders and several client representatives judged entries on business value, technical quality and feasibility.
The three winners
- First prize – CodeLens: an assistant that reads legacy code and automatically produces documentation and architecture diagrams for systems with millions of lines. In a trial on a live project, onboarding time for new engineers fell from three weeks to five days.
- Second prize – ClaimFlow: a solution that reads and classifies insurance claims, extracting information from photographed documents with 94% accuracy.
- Third prize – ShiftMate: a shift-planning tool for factories that combines optimisation with demand forecasting models.
From idea to product
Unlike previous years, the three winning teams receive more than a trophy. They are given a budget and six months of full-time work to develop their products in Zentrova Labs, the company's internal incubator. CodeLens is expected to become part of Zentrova's project onboarding process from the fourth quarter of 2026.
What impressed me most was that the teams did not chase technology for its own sake. They started from real user pain points, and that is exactly the mindset we want to spread across the company.
A culture of innovation
The hackathon is one of several initiatives that nurture a culture of experimentation at Zentrova, alongside a monthly innovation day and an employee idea fund. Since 2019, eleven internal products have come out of the hackathon, and four of them are now used by clients.
All team presentations and sample code are stored on the internal knowledge portal so project teams can keep building on them.
