Winners of the 2025 Workday DevCon hackathon: How TechWolf built a winning agent in 24 hours

TL;DR

TechWolf took home the first prize at the 2025 Workday DevCon Hackathon, just two months after joining the Built on Workday (BoW) partner program. Our winning solution, the AI Transformation Agent, helps companies manage AI transformation directly within Workday. With real business impact, pilot tech, and a strong vision for the future of human-machine collaboration, we built it and pitched it in just 24 hours. Here's how we did it.

The new Workday economy: why we jumped in

Josh Bersin recently called it "the rise of the Workday Economy": a growing partner ecosystem that transforms Workday from a platform into a marketplace for innovation. For tech companies like TechWolf, that shift isn’t just exciting - it’s strategic.

It’s why we joined the BoW program in April. Workday Extend gives us the opportunity to bring our workforce AI directly into customers' hands, embedded in their existing Workday workflows. And what better way to kick off our journey than the ultimate test: the DevCon Hackathon.

From new partner to hackathon champions

Just two months ago, we were newcomers.

In late April, we reached out to our BoW Partner Manager, Maud, with an ambitious idea: run an internal hackathon to build and deploy our first Workday Extend app to production, in 24 hours.

Workday didn’t just say yes. They jumped in with both feet. Two of their top Extend experts, John and Maya, joined our crash course, helping our engineers ramp up fast. Their guidance was instrumental to our success.

The result? We built and shipped our first app: Worker Skill Assistant.

It’s already being adopted by some of our Workday customers, a clear sign that Extend is not just a playground, but a production-ready platform for enterprise innovation.

DevCon Week: certification and new tools

We kicked off DevCon by taking the Extend Pro Certification exam. Both Ruben and René passed with flying colors, our first win of the week.

Then came the DevCon product previews. Workday showcased upcoming features in Extend, and even better, some of these were made available for Hackathon participants to test. These pilot capabilities would later become key scoring criteria.

Inside the DevCon hackathon

The challenge: Build a Workday Extend app in 24 hours.

The format:

• Pitch in seven rounds of elo scoring.
• Top 10 teams advanced to the final stage to give a pitch and live demo on stage.
• Top 3 winners were selected by jury, with an additional crowd favorite award.

Judging criteria:

1. Business Value
2. Innovation
3. Use of Pilot Technology

Our app: the AI Transformation Agent

We built the AI Transformation Agent, an Extend-native app that helps organizations manage AI transformation across their workforce.

The concept builds on the Agent System of Record model, helping enterprises:

• Track AI adoption at the team level
• Guide managers through responsible AI deployment
• Ensure employees have the right skills to collaborate with AI

As Athena Karp put it during the award ceremony:

"Our clients are looking for how they shepherd in the future of work. And at the core of that future of work, it's about moving from humans to human-machine collaboration. That human is at the center of ensuring that collaboration is successful. Our clients don't have a roadmap. There's no trail. There's no precedent. How do we usher that in responsibly?"

The AI Transformation Agent helps answer that.

Reflections from the team

AI was clearly the common thread running through this year’s Workday DevCon. During the Hackathon, we saw a huge opportunity to not just build with individual AI features, but to help organizations manage AI transformation across their workforce, end to end, within Workday. Our product was all about turning AI from scattered experiments into a systematic, data-driven journey, seamlessly integrated into the Workday platform.  Mathieu De Baets Product manager TechWolf 

Behind the scenes, our engineers were navigating a steep learning curve, adapting to a new platform, integrating with Workday Extend, and applying real-time feedback from experts. It wasn't just about coding fast. It was about solving real problems for real users, with the tools available in a high-pressure timeframe.

We want to give a huge shoutout to René, Ruben, Mathieu, and Jeroen , the team that made it happen. This win is a direct result of your talent and teamwork, and the entire TechWolf team couldn’t be prouder.

Big thanks to our partners

We couldn’t have done it without:

• The Workday DevCon team for running a flawless event
• The Hackathon Jury (you know who you are!) for the sharp questions and great energy
• The Built on Workday team , especially Maud, John, and Maya , for setting us up for success

Celebration & What’s next

Yes, we AWOO-d on stage with the judges. 🐺

Yes, we celebrated with BattleBots teambuilding.

And yes, we’ll be back next year.

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