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Netskope recently conducted its inaugural Promptathon event, a company-wide, hackathon-style competition designed to drive innovation, increase AI fluency, and accelerate the adoption of AI across the organization. The event’s objective was to spark creativity and challenge employees to foster cross-departmental collaboration and build practical solutions for real business challenges.
With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at what the Promptathon entailed and what sorts of results we saw from it:
What is the “Promptathon?”
The Promptathon was a one-day, company-wide competition with dedicated planning and submission periods to facilitate broad global participation among our highly dispersed and remote workforce.
Held on October 9th, participation was invited and encouraged from every single team in the business, either individually or in teams. The goal was to identify and develop AI-driven solutions to real business challenges.
To ensure all employees could participate, we chose AI platforms that were accessible across the entire company, further encouraging departments who are not typically involved in new technology exploration to start using AI. Specifically, teams had company managed AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and NotebookLM, at their disposal. This focus not only helped us achieve the key goal of increasing AI fluency among employees across all departments, but also ensured compliance with mandatory privacy and security standards.
Projects from the Promptathon were then reviewed and evaluated by a panel of 12 leaders and executives, specifically looking at:
- Innovation & Creativity
- Impact & Value
- Feasibility & Practicality
- Presentation & Clarity
Results from the Promptathon
The Promptathon achieved exceptional global participation. In total we had more than 600 participants, forming over 100 teams, with 90+ project submissions. This effort included participants from 17 different departments across more than 20 countries.
The most interesting statistic we observed was that use of our AI platforms doubled from 700 weekly users to 1,500 weekly users during the event period, and since the Promptathon we’ve continued to see these levels of use grow. It’s particularly exciting to see that the success of this event is having a sustained impact on the way teams use AI in their day-to-day.
Seven teams were recognized for creating particularly innovative solutions that demonstrated a direct business impact. Winning efforts included automations built by our IT and security teams to support incident resolution and faster diagnosis, QA and scripting from our product engineers, and in the less technical teams we saw sales pairing customer insights with product solutions and HR making onboarding documentation into more interactive resources.
What’s next?
The success of our first Promptathon not only confirms significant internal demand for continued AI use internally, but also an appetite to innovate. And with a clear view of the immediate organizational benefits of AI use, we are now busily working on plans to ensure we sustain this momentum.
These plans include hosting more Promptathons in the future, either annually or semi-annually, as well as creating a referenceable library that keeps high-value use cases (in this case Gemini Gems) organized by their functional area (Sales, Engineering, Customer Success, etc.). We’re also asking winning and high-scoring teams to present deep dives into their projects during internal Tech Talks over the coming months.
Overall, the 2025 Netskope Promptathon successfully harnessed employee creativity to drive practical AI innovation and has helped foster a culture of technical collaboration and real-world problem-solving. Plus, of course, we came away with useful solutions that are immediately delivering value to our customers and internal teams.
While the Promptathon offered a good opportunity for our own teams to disrupt their day-to-day workflows and processes with AI, it’s not always easy to know where to start. If you’d like to learn more about how to enable AI adoption for your team and defend against the potential threats it brings, read The AI Security Playbook.
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