We just ran the inaugural AI Engine hackathon for the UK’s leading young engineering talent – this is what we learned

You don’t often see the world’s top tech companies show up to demo their products to students. But AI innovators establishing direct connections with young and early-career talent is the bedrock of any successful tech ecosystem – and that is exactly what the AI Engine initiative is working to build across Europe, one hackathon at a time.

Last weekend, organisers including Zoe Qin from Dawn Capital, Jamesin Seidel from Chapter One, Justina Chung from Bessemer Venture Partners, Will Bennett from Seedcamp, and Patrick Gilday, Angel Investor and staff at UCL, launched the inaugural AI Engine event at UCL. 

We were blown away by the response. The depth of talent present, the calibre, and number of sponsors and mentors was incredible. The two-day event hosted over 200 students and recent alumni of UCL, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial, bringing together those already working in space with those interested in learning more. Over 50 industry leaders attended alongside AI Engine’s 10 tech partners, including representatives from Google Cloud, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Canva, OpenAI, Mistral, Nvidia, Vercel, Ragie, Hyperbolic, Encore and DataSpartan.

A full-day of workshops included sessions from sponsors sharing exclusive demos with students on how to best to leverage their technology, which was open to any interested young developers. This was followed by a dramatic full day hackathon, which saw participants transform ideas into impressive working demos. 

Our idea was for the hackathon to address four areas being disrupted/reinvented by AI advances: workplace automation, future of search, customer experience, and personal productivity. Participants were asked to choose a track and build an AI solution in the area. The overall winner - ReflectAI (Ai Daniil Bekirov, Vladimir Osipov & Danay Dikhanbayev from UCL and Oxford) – combined seven different AI platforms/tools to create a working customer success voice app.

For us as organisers, it felt like a huge feat to have >300 people together under the same roof, and to be able to facilitate participants’ access to the world’s leading AI companies and wider VC and industry leaders. It was also a privilege to work with participants and see the cutting-edge solutions they produced. 

Now, we plan to build on the inaugural AI Engine event's success. We are thrilled to announce that we will be running events in partnership with educational institutions, venture and startup communities in locations across Europe in the future. To find out more about where we’re going next, see here.

For now, here are just some of the things that struck us the most / that we took away from the inaugural AI Engine event: 

Students were committed to being there - and these events can have a long-lasting impact

Justina shared how nothing—not broken cars or bike crashes—could stop these engineers from building something incredible. “I was seriously impressed by the sheer grit,” she said. “Like the Cambridge team who had a car breakdown and trekked through a forest to catch the train to make it, or the student who crashed his bike and still showed up. And that same determination carried into the hackathon—within 7 hours, teams built sophisticated working demos, showing how today’s AI tools, in the right hands, are incredibly powerful.”

Zoe said participants have followed-up to say they are going to work with their Hackathon teams to make their project commercially viable, and even try building a startup. “That shows how this type of event can have a lasting impact,” she said. “It was amazing to see the mentors go around supporting and mediating, and helping participants lean into a professional building lens.”

London is buzzing with oversubscribed events - and the next AI unicorn will come from its ecosystem 

Jamesin said that “by the end of the day, it became clear — the next unicorn, billion-dollar company will come from the London ecosystem, and the founders might have been in that room”. 

Patrick agreed. He said: “We are at the beginning of the most transformative technology revolution since the internet. The only boundary to what one can create is imagination. The tools are at our fingertips - there has never been a better time to build a generation defining company. Our event had hundreds of the most imaginative and capable young minds in London. It couldn’t have been a better day… the next Nobel Laureate, the next industry leader might well have been among them!”

Kimoon Kim, principal startup customer engineer at Google Cloud, also sees huge promise in the ecosystem. He said: "London is such a great place because we have people from all parts of the world coming in, working together and seeing what great innovative things that they could build. My piece of advice to students would be: keep on innovating. Think big, because you never know what amazing discoveries that you're going to be making.”

When it comes to building with AI, it’s all about the tooling and how it’s used

Matt Carey, AI Engineer at London-based AI startup, StackOne, and Co-Founder of event series, AI Demo Days, said that he would encourage anyone hoping for a career in AI to attend events like AI Engine. 

He said: “It really helps people start building if they know how to work with the latest and greatest tools. As an operator, I get to play with the latest and greatest from all the major companies, so I know that you can have this “AI moment” when you experience a workflow and it helps you build a product you’d never have thought of before.” 

Rohan Mirchandani, a senior Canva ML engineer, added that the event reinforced his conviction that it’s vital not to over-index on certain tools. He said: "My number one piece of advice for people who are getting into this industry is not to index too much on individual tools, algorithms, or models. The key to being really successful and being good at ML and AI is to learn to have good fundamentals that allow you to roll with the changes."

Young talent can build commercially viable end-to-end solutions in a single day – so they should just start building and sharing

Will, an investor at Seedcamp, said he was struck by the exceptional talent density at the event. He said: “Seeing completely new products built in a day is one thing but seeing commercially viable end-to-end solutions is another. Any investor trying to find top companies before they are obvious should be getting behind the up and coming Hackathons.”

Steve Ruiz, the founder of whiteboard startup tldraw and an event mentor, said he left convinced that the next step for young AI talent is just to build and share - without fear of failure. He said: “The number of free resources, free credits, free whatever for teams that are doing something novel is just astounding. Teams only need to build and put it out there. See what resonates. If nothing works, start over, do something else. Today really showed the power of a good prototype, a good demo.”

Find out more about upcoming AI Engine events here, and subscribe to our newsletter: https://aienginehack.beehiiv.com/subscribe