Arla Barn AI Hackathon: Reflections

As part of our Barn AI transformation programme initiated in Summer 2024, we've been running seven ambitious pilots through our 'challenge' framework. With only four weeks remaining until our final deadline, we gathered teams at Arla HQ in Denmark for an intensive Hack Week to accelerate progress and breathe life into our prototypes.

1. Real Life is the New Luxury While virtual collaboration moved us forward, bringing teams together in person elevated our thinking, collaboration, and creativity. In-person interaction sparked serendipitous ideas and deeper connection.

2. AI Compresses Timescales Ten years ago, at Amex Innovation Labs, developing a bare bones prototype required eight people working over twelve weeks. With Barn AI, we've achieved ten functioning prototypes in just one week, showcasing AI's remarkable potential to make things real.

3. Experiment with Enterprise, On-Demand, and Custom Tech Our enterprise technology offers stability and scale but lacks the agility of on-demand tools like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, custom technology platforms, such as N8N and comfy.ui, demonstrated exceptional power for applications that don't require direct enterprise data integration.

4. Stimulate Human Creativity AI may not excel at original ideation, but our "Creative Council" prototype provided diverse viewpoints, now we’re testing it with new council members and on live briefs.

5. Balance Innovation with Governance Our experiments with AI-generated food imagery highlighted critical governance challenges and deeply-rooted cultural beliefs about food. We learned the importance of dedicating equal energy to stakeholder alignment and governance as we do to technological innovation.