Citi’s HR leaders hosted a hackathon to jumpstart AI adoption inside the people team

Hackathons are a familiar sight around Silicon Valley. Teams get together for an intensive, time-limited event and collaborate on a project, set of projects, or to tackle a specific problem statement. The high-energy event can bring excitement and sometimes friendly competition to the work.

Hackathons are far less common inside the HR departments of global financial institutions.

But that’s exactly what Jeff Bienstock, Citi’s global head of HR operations and technology, set out to do in order to accelerate AI adoption amongst HR colleagues and harness their expertise to ideate AI use-cases to better run HR across the business.

“Citi was in the process of rolling out a variety of internal tools for our employees, and what we were trying to solve for was…how do we get excitement behind an adoption of these tools within our HR function, specifically,” Beinstock said. “We had this philosophy, or maybe hypothesis is a better word, that there’s a lot of really talented, innovative folks within HR that would thrive given the opportunity to showcase some of the talent and use some of these tools internally.”

Let’s hack. Borrowing a page from the Big Tech and startup playbook, Beinstock launched the HR hackathon in May, opening participation to all HR employees across geographies, functions, and seniority levels. In total, roughly 180 people pros participated, on 35 different teams. Some organized teams ahead of time, while others signed up as individuals and met their teammates for the first time ahead of their project, Beinstock added.

Participants were given 10 working days to come up with the first drafts of their projects and proposals. Ten teams were selected as finalists and presented their projects live to a panel of six judges.

Instead of prescribing exactly what employees should build, organizers offered several broad challenge areas—including career pathing, skills, and root cause analysis—while also allowing participants to propose entirely new ideas.

One standout project tackled internal career mobility by combining and analyzing employee profiles, résumés, skills data, company collateral, leadership principles, job descriptions, and learning resources to recommend new opportunities across the company.

And Citi is already iterating on this, adding learning recommendations to its system so it can prompt employees to pursue learning opportunities specific to their career paths in order to strengthen their match to open roles.

But, Citi’s a bank. Move fast and break things isn’t a common refrain in the world of financial institutions, inside one of the most highly regulated industries in the US. But for the sake of the hackathon, participants were asked to ignore their risk-averse instincts in an effort to ideate the best, most creative application of the technology to their company’s HR work.

“Our feeling was if people chose a very outlandish idea, it would be easier to walk them back incrementally to what was available at Citi versus it started with a very controlled, risk-averse idea and try to incrementally build on top, and we said, ‘just go crazy,’” he said.

Now that the winning projects have been selected, risk, legal, model governance, and audit teams will ensure scaling across the entire organization is successful and compliant.

Separately, the hackathon also revealed a group of AI champions within Citi’s HR unit. Beinstock said those who participated and developed smaller use-cases are sharing some of the things they’re building using the tools Citi offers to employees to make their everyday lives easier. These HR folks are presenting at town halls and answering Qs at AMAs about AI inbox hacks, how AI can help generate self assessments, and more.

While production of the tools designed by the hackathon winners is the present priority, Beinstock told HR Brew he’s already looking forward to the next HR hackathon. He’s hoping for even more participation, to add some competitive elements to the event, and to potentially suggest even fewer prompts to really let the participants’ creativity shine.