How Presidio’s Forward-Thinking Innovation Sprint Drives AI-Powered Business Growth

At Presidio, Forward-Thinking isn't just one of our core values, it's the engine that drives our culture of innovation. Staying ahead of the curve is essential to helping our clients navigate change with confidence, and we put that philosophy into practice through creativity-fueled initiatives like hackathons, Shark Tank-style competitions, and, most recently, our global Innovation Sprint.

Launched in 2024 to unite our Forward-Thinking spirit with our One Presidio commitment to act as a connected, worldwide team, the Innovation Sprint is built on a living blueprint. Each year, the approach evolves alongside technology, ensuring fresh collaboration, bold experimentation, and tangible business impact. Past sprints have sparked multimillion-dollar solutions, fueled market differentiators, and even earned us the grand prize in the Cisco Partner Innovation Challenge.

This year, our theme, AI & Agents, brought employees across regions, practices, and functions together to explore how AI can streamline processes, enhance customer agility, and scale innovation company-wide. From AI learning tracks to Shark Tank-style pitching and a 22-hour global hackathon, the 2025 Innovation Sprint showcased how Forward-Thinking transforms into real-world, AI-powered outcomes.

We interviewed our Innovation Sprint participants on their experience:

What inspired your idea for the Innovation Sprint, and how does it tie into our forward-thinking culture?

The idea was inspired by one of our FinOps engagement, with a luxury jewelry brand, where we spent long hours manually scripting to analyze costs and utilization across thousands of resources. We saw this as a perfect opportunity to use AI for automated data collection and analysis, allowing us to focus on insights, decisions, and architectural recommendations-reflecting our culture of forward-thinking and smart innovation.

What was the most exciting or surprising part of the 24-hour hackathon experience for you?

As a first-time participant, the most exciting part was collaborating with brilliant minds to build a meaningful AI-powered tool. The energy in the office and the support from the organizing team kept us motivated and made the 24 hours truly memorable.

How do you see the solution your team built making an impact in the future (at Presidio or beyond)?

Our solution has the potential to transform FinOps engagements at Presidio by significantly reducing manual effort, eliminating errors, and accelerating time-to-insight. With built-in automation for both analysis and actions, finops.aipositions Presidio as a differentiator in the market and helps clients embed FinOps as a sustainable, value-driven practice.

What inspired your idea for the Innovation Sprint, and how does it tie into our forward-thinking culture?

The idea was sparked by discussions with educators who felt that AI was adding pressure instead of easing their workload. We wanted to turn AI from a challenge into a partner that validates learning, saves time, and builds trust in classrooms. This is exactly what forward-thinking at Presidio means: anticipating issues and creating solutions that drive better outcomes.

What was the most exciting or surprising part of the 24-hour hackathon experience for you?

The most exciting moment was watching the judges understand that our idea wasn't about replacing teachers but empowering them. We knew it could easily be misunderstood that way, so we worked hard to frame it as an AI companion, not a substitute. The fact that the judges connected instantly showed our preparation paid off.

How do you see the solution your team built making an impact in the future (at Presidio or beyond)?

We see it as a platform Presidio can replicate across schools to drive measurable outcomes like time saved, stronger student support, and higher parent engagement. Over time, the same framework could scale into higher education. By combining collaboration, security, and AI, it positions Presidio as a trusted leader in intelligent, connected environments.

What inspired your idea for the Innovation Sprint, and how does it tie into our forward-thinking culture?

Our inspiration for Twinster came from noticing how much time people spend repeating same tasks over and over - whether it's HR teams running onboarding sessions or delivery teams having to run the same KT sessions with every new joiner. We felt there had to be a better way, and that's where the idea of a personal AI twin came in. Twinster takes care of those repeated sessions and gives people back valuable time. While many are still focused on text-based LLMs, we believe the real future is multimodal AI that can work across text, audio, and video, making interactions feel far more natural. Twinster is our way of bringing that future to life and showing that at Presidio, we don't just talk about being AI-ready, we practice it by building tools that make work smarter and more human.

What was the most exciting or surprising part of the 24-hour hackathon experience for you?

For us, the most exciting part was seeing an idea go from just a spark to something real in only 24 hours. With such a short window, every choice mattered - we had to take calculated risks, adapt fast when blockers came up, and decide what was worth building within the time we had. What made it even better was doing it together as a team, pushing ourselves, and realizing just how much we could pull off in a single day when the clock was ticking.

How do you see the solution your team built making an impact in the future (at Presidio or beyond)?

We see Twinster making a difference in so many areas - from HR onboarding and training to customer support, project handovers, and even those meetings that tend to be repetitive. For Presidio, it's a way to show that we don't just advise others on AI, we use it ourselves to change how we work and stay ahead. And beyond Presidio, we believe AI twins like this can reshape how organizations everywhere scale personal interactions and free people up to focus on what really matters.

What inspired your idea for the Innovation Sprint, and how does it tie into our forward-thinking culture?

Having architected Presidio Captivate for our TMEGS vertical/sports customers, I also recognized its limitations with simple semantic search. The Innovation Sprint was the perfect opportunity to push beyond that and introduce an agentic experience with true thinking, reasoning, and creation capabilities. Captivate AI embodies this vision - a forward-thinking intelligence solution that doesn't just search, but actually thinks, reasons, and creates. It's also designed with expansion in mind, extending beyond sports into news, music, podcasts, and documents.

What was the most exciting or surprising part of the 24-hour hackathon experience for you?

The most exciting challenge was fitting our entire Auditron story into under five minutes. We had to clearly present the problem, the need, and the solution - all while keeping it engaging. A role play between a potential bank customer and a Presidio architect helped bring the problem to life, and introducing Auditron as a futuristic agentic solution made the story compelling. Adding humor, like the idea that with our AI agents you'd be on vacation while they do the work, made the pitch both fun and memorable - and it was very well received by the Sharks.

How do you see the solution your team built making an impact in the future (at Presidio or beyond)?

With Captivate AI, I see a perfect opportunity for Presidio to showcase the art of the possible at events like NAB NY this October, AWS re:Invent, or NAB Vegas next year. By integrating with AWS Media Lake, it has the potential to be a disruptive solution that positions us strongly in the sports world while also expanding into news, music, podcasts, and other media domains. With Auditron, the impact lies in transforming compliance from a manual, time-consuming burden into a faster, smarter, and more proactive process for financial institutions - with the ability to expand into healthcare and the public sector. Together, these solutions highlight Presidio's forward-thinking approach to elevating customer experiences while solving critical challenges across industries.

What inspired your idea for the Innovation Sprint, and how does it tie into our forward-thinking culture?

I was inspired during the Innovation Sprint AI enablement and began collaborating with my colleagues, on large language models, MCP Servers, and IaC automation. That's when it clicked-what if we combined the power of AI with Infrastructure Automation? After testing the idea through customer demos and seeing the positive feedback, we knew we had something worth expanding into the hackathon. This ties directly to Presidio's forward-thinking culture, which encourages continuous learning, experimentation, and collaboration to push boundaries and create new possibilities.

What was the most exciting or surprising part of the 24-hour hackathon experience for you?

The most exciting and surprising part was seeing what we accomplished in just 24 hours, despite all the pivots and technical hurdles. Each setback forced us to innovate and find creative workarounds, even when it felt like we might not finish. In the final hours everything came together, and I was incredibly proud of our submission. I'm still amazed we pulled through with something we can all be proud of.

How do you see the solution your team built making an impact in the future (at Presidio or beyond)?

Our hackathon submission, InfraGenie, is an AI-powered orchestration solution for brownfield infrastructure that has the potential to benefit many of Presidio's customers. What we built during the hackathon was just the beginning-we've already continued to enhance it and share it with customers. I'm also working with internal teams to further develop InfraGenie, with the goal of seeing it adopted by customers who can realize real value from AI-powered Brownfield Infrastructure Orchestration.

Related:

• Presidio Culture and Belonging
• Presidio Top 100 Inspiring Workplace Winner