SAP NS2 HackAIthon: Turning AI into impact

September 3, 2026

What’s the best way to equip employees with AI efficiency? Make it a competition!

For the first time ever, SAP NS2 held the SAP NS2 HackAIthon: a three-week competition challenging employees, contractors, and interns to build innovative AI agents that solve real SAP NS2 problems.

The competition brought together 318 participants across 71 teams, with projects focused on saving time, increasing productivity, improving quality, reducing risk, and creating better customer experiences. Teams could pick from three tracks: Track A, (agent builder), Track B (API development), or Track C for interns with A and B paths. Using IRIS, SAP NS2’s agent-building platform, teams turned ideas into working solutions across areas including finance, engineering, sales, and more.

While every team brought something unique to the competition, four participants stood out with innovative solutions and unique perspectives. Here’s what they built and what they learned along the way.

Who they are, what they built, and their impact

This year’s HackAIthon participants took on a wide range of challenges. Hear how Erin Dodd, Bala Prabahar, Yahya Masri, and Erika Sissions brought their AI ideas to life.

Erin Dodd, Finance Specialist | Budget Forecasting Agent

Erin Dodd alongside her team, the Budget Bots, tackled the manual work involved in creating budget forecasts.

Their budget forecasting agent automates Excel charts, executive summary emails, and presentations, creating a usable tool that saves time for both their team and other lines of business.

Bala Prabahar, SAP Basis Consultant | TraceWise AI

Bala Prabahar and the Instant-Insight team built TraceWise AI, an incident investigation assistant that analyzes SAP developer trace files, identifies critical errors and warnings, and generates actionable reports so teams can diagnose technical issues faster.

The tool is already being used in real customer scenarios. Just one week after the HackAIthon, Bala used it to analyze hundreds of trace files in about six minutes, helping rule out a potential cause and saving hours of manual review.

Yahya Masri, Language Model Intern | wAI

Yahya Masri and the “This is the wAI” team built a personal knowledge assistant that brings scattered information and AI tools into one place. By combining Microsoft 365 signals, workspace records, and source-backed retrieval, wAI aims to reduce context switching and preserve knowledge continuity.

Yahya’s team earned first place among the intern teams and was selected for further development to benefit employees across SAP NS2.

Erika Sissions, Senior DevOps Engineer | LangGraph Triage MRs (LGTM)

Erika Sissions and the Ex Machinas team developed the LangGraph triage MRs agent (LGTM), an agentic workflow that combines four smaller AI agents, designed to reduce lengthy code reviews on lower-risk merge requests while making pipeline errors and Wiz findings more actionable.

Erika’s team won first place in Track B and is now awaiting deployment for use in everyday workflows.

The takeaway

While the agents may have been the focus of the HackAIthon, the experience offered another kind of takeaway. We asked Bala, Erin, Yahya, and Erika to reflect on what challenged them and what they’ll carry forward.

The teams faced their share of challenges along the way. Bala balanced the HackAIthon with customer support, while Erin’s team worked around a busy month-end close. Yahya focused on making his solution accessible and useful to employees with different levels of technical experience, while Erika worked to keep her team aligned as they turned multiple ideas into one shared solution.

Whether they walked away with a first-place finish or simply a new skill, each participant gained something from the experience. For Bala, the HackAIthon provided an opportunity to take a meaningful first step toward solving a real challenge. Erin gained hands-on experience building AI agents and seeing how they could reduce manual work. Yahya saw the value of turning an idea into a solution that could benefit employees across SAP NS2, while Erika found the experience reinforced the power of collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

Their advice

Looking ahead to the next HackAIthon, our participants have a few pieces of advice for those ready to take on the challenge.

“Have AI help you with your prompting and agent building.”

“Get a clear understanding of what qualifies as a new idea versus an existing one before getting started.”

“Don’t only think about the issues your own team faces. Think about what could benefit the entire company.”

“Time management is very important. Also, communicate, communicate, communicate, especially when you need help!”

We couldn’t be prouder of the incredible work put forward by Bala, Erin, Yahya, Erika, and all HackAIthon participants. Their creativity, collaboration, drive, and willingness to experiment with AI made the competition a great success.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s SAP NS2 HackAIthon and to the AI & Enterprise Data Observability team for hosting and supporting the competition. We’re excited to see where these ideas make an impact!

To learn more about how SAP NS2 empowering customers to use AI for their workflows, explore here.

Written by

SAP NS2 Staff