What Our 2026 Hackathon Revealed About the Future of Innovation at Otelier

There are moments in a company’s life when you get a clear glimpse of what the future could look like. For me, last week provided one of those moments, when dozens of team members across our product and engineering teams came together for Otelier’s first hackathon.

I had the opportunity to serve as a judge, and I came away with an even deeper respect for the creativity, urgency, and talent across Otelier. Over the course of the event, 18 teams developed ideas spanning customer onboarding, insights, cost validation, optimization, and more – all through the lens of AI-enabled innovation.

What stood out most was how quickly those ideas came to life.

We are operating in a time when AI is dramatically accelerating how software gets built. The cycle from idea to prototype is shrinking. The barriers between identifying a problem and testing a solution are coming down. And that creates a real opportunity for teams like ours to move faster on behalf of our customers.

The hackathon created space for teams to step outside of their day-to-day roles and think creatively about how to make hotel technology easier, smarter, and more valuable for the people who rely on it every day.

I also want to specifically recognize Ani Gujrathi, who launched Otelier’s first hackathon only about 90 days into his tenure as Chief Technology & Product Officer. Ani is building something bigger than a single event – a visible, company-wide expression of the innovation culture we want to foster. The level of excitement was unmistakable.

Two of the winning projects offer a strong example of what this looked like in practice:

• Team Boarding Pass focused on rethinking onboarding through a self-service, AI-assisted experience. The team’s goal was straightforward but important: help customers onboard more quickly and experience a live trial environment in minutes, instead of relying on support-heavy processes that delay time to value. Their prototype used AI to analyze uploaded reports and intelligently identify the PMS, combining that analysis with business logic to improve accuracy across PMS versions and report variations.
  
  
• Team Schema Chameleons tackled the challenge of data validation during onboarding. The team built an AI-powered validation assistant designed to compare data, interpret discrepancies, and recommend escalation paths. The prototype enables users to identify the right source-system reports, validate thousands of records quickly, surface variances instantly, and significantly shorten time to resolution.

In both cases, the teams had to solve for the messy reality of hotel data. They worked through challenges such as teaching AI the business meaning behind metrics like RevPAR, ADR, and occupancy, and normalizing data across Excel, CSV, PDF, and custom source formats. This is the kind of practical, customer-centered innovation that makes a real difference.

Not every hackathon idea will become a product overnight. But as Ani shared, these ideas will move into the product roadmap for prioritization, giving us a clear path to evaluate, refine, and bring the most impactful concepts to market.

Innovation is no longer just about long roadmaps and distant product plans. It is increasingly about how quickly talented teams can identify friction, test ideas, and prove what is possible. And in hospitality technology, where our customers are under constant pressure to do more with less, that speed matters.