Code Scores First and Second Place at OMD EMEA’s Retail AI Hackathon

Around 50 people from the UK, Poland, Russia,Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Romania gathered at OMD EMEA’s headquarters in London on 2-3 March to discover how bots could impact six different retail brands.

Of the six bots created during the hackathon two focused on inspiration and consideration, two looked at enhancing consumer experiences and two tackled improving customer service. The energy,ideas and creativity were truly inspiring.

At the end of the two-day hackathon, judges evaluated the retail bot creations across five main criteria – innovation, retail impact, complexity, business case and quality of the experience. A leading manufacturer and marketer of prestige skincare, makeup, fragrance and hair care products was declared to have created the winning concept, with a British supermarket chain taking second place. Both concepts focused on inspiration and consideration tying in image recognition to make the processless time-consuming.

Ed Freed, CCO at Code Worldwide commented, “We approach hackathons as a great chance to fail and learn, however our capable teams rolled up their sleeves and went from a standing start to two winning concepts in just 24 hours.”

Introducing the Retail Revolution: OMD’s Retail Revolution research initiative exploring how consumers accept, understand and trust AI at the point of purchase. 

As part of this research, all retail bots developed in the hackathon were tested in a consumer workshop to investigate consumer perceptions of, and behaviours with, the different activations.