Innovating with Advanced AI: HackApply'25
- Company Update
- 4 MIN READ
- Aug, 2025
-
Apply DigitalStaff
Summary
At Apply Digital we regularly hold HackApply, a one-day hackathon during which employees are challenged to get creative and innovate around fresh ideas and concepts to transform our business.
Our teams already use AI in day-to-day functions, and we've built custom AI solutions for clients to help them drive results. To further our AI expertise and adoption, the 2025 edition of HackApply focused on encouraging teams to solve internal challenges through an AI-first lens.
This year we saw an incredible amount of innovation and creative thinking from Apply Digital team members, all of whom worked hard to deliver prototypes — and in a few cases, nearly-finished products — that can deliver value for our company and our clients.
What is HackApply?
HackApply is Apply Digital's continuation of the hackathon tradition, a collaborative event to promote team-building, strengthen company culture and drive innovation in a unique way. To up the ante and promote healthy competition, at the end of every HackApply, Apply Digital makes a contribution to a charity selected by the winning team.
This year's edition of HackApply took an intensive approach to working with the latest AI tools, empowering our teams to truly push the envelope — and they delivered.
The Tools
For HackApply '25 we were fortunate to have advanced access to Google Agentspace, which our teams leveraged to quickly iterate on their project builds. Google mentors were available to support our teams for the duration of the hackathon.
Some teams also used other tools including n8n and FloraFauna to help develop their projects, allowing them to get creative and try fresh approaches to solving problems on the fly. Other tools leveraged include Google Gemini, Google AI Studio, and Notion AI.
HackApply is fun and inspiring for our employees, but the event also drives business value. For this year's theme, we had a backlog of ideas around AI enablement for ourselves and for clients, and these ideas defined the list of projects our HackApply teams could choose from. As a result, all of the projects were good — we're going to operationalize every one of them.
The Projects
Our teams built out 11 unique projects during HackApply, each of which uses AI to solve a complex problem. From synthetic personas that support Business Development efforts to brand tone generators that produce on-brand content with a few prompts, all of the projects showed ingenuity and creative thinking.
One project in particular, however, stood out for its potential to drive business value and took the title of winner.
And the winner is…
The winning project was Rosetta Bridge, an AI-powered application that translates complex technical documents into easy-to-digest natural English.
The problem: Developers are forced to become translators, spending hours explaining complex data structures to product managers, designers, and clients. This manual, repetitive process is not only inefficient but also prone to error, leading to the kind of simple misunderstandings that can derail projects and create friction between teams.
The solution: Rosetta Bridge — a powerful, standalone tool that proves the value of instant translation. The vision is to transform this assistant into an autonomous engine powered by a robust API. This engine will be deeply woven into the tools you already use, turning documentation from a manual chore into a zero-effort, background process.
Rosetta Bridge is a perfect example of the innovative solutions our experts can leverage AI to create to solve highly-technical problems. The long-term plan is to evolve Rosetta Bridge into an invisible agent that lives inside workflows: for developers, pushing a code change would automatically generate a clear explanation for PMs to review. For designers, updating a design would prompt Rosetta Bridge to automatically update design system documentation in real time. The possibilities are many, and the business value that can be generated by this tool are substantial.
HackApply empowers our experts to dig into complex challenges in a fun and innovative way, while leveraging the latest AI tools to drive efficiency and business impact. This year, our teams delivered incredibly impressive solutions that demonstrate not only technical expertise, but strong creative problem solving and collaboration skills as well.
That's a wrap
HackApply '25 was an overwhelming success, both in terms of the products our teams created and the deep integration of AI tools into our workflows. By bringing together experts from across a range of disciplines, HackApply helps us continue to exercise our capability to innovate and develop new solutions for clients and our internal teams. HackApply also nurtures a strong company culture and reinforces our SHAPE values, which inform everything we do at Apply Digital.
Find out how Apply Digital can help your organization drive impact through AI-powered digital change. Contact our expert team today.
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