Winning a hackathon can be the highlight of a Salesforce professional’s career, and, let’s face it, it makes for a very impressive LinkedIn post too.
We spoke to Agile Delivery Consultant Anna Bromley, who manages Salesforce transformations, and Salesforce Architect Jeff Kallenbach, who formed Team ForceFront and won the top prize – a free ticket to Dreamforce – at the TDX 2025 Agentforce Hackathon in London.
Here’s how they won it – and their tips for ambitious Salesforce professionals looking to do the same.
Team ForceFront’s Success Strategy
Team ForceFront decided to get involved in the hackathon roughly two weeks before the event after thinking up a decent use case for an AI agent.
The team built the agents and submitted a video with an audio track, recorded by Anna, outlining what they had built.
Jeff and Anna were having meetings every other day, working over the weekends to get the recording just right, making tweaks here and there to give them an edge on the competition.
ForceFront then heard the good news that they had been selected for the “top three”.
Jeff told Salesforce Ben: “On the day itself, Anna and I presented along with the other two finalists as well to an audience in London, and obviously did quite well.”
On the day of the event itself, the team presented a silent video, narrating it themselves, which “had its problems” because there was no pausing, meaning the team had to keep a constant pace and not go off-script too much.
Later that day, they discovered that they had won – while in another session.
“I don’t think we really heard the last five minutes,” said Jeff.
“No, because we were so excited,” said Anna.
The following day, at the TDX keynote, they were then presented with their prize – a free ticket to Dreamforce.
The prize includes $1,000 to go towards airfares and $2,000 for a hotel. All the finalists also got a pair of Apple Max headphones.
What Was Their Solution?
ForceFront built four specific agents – three employee agents and one customer agent – to help with running a housing association, which Jeff has some experience with historically.
Of the three employee agents, one was a chat which was searchable by a customer service representative.
“Because it’s connected to CRM data, you could search things like what’s the most important case for me today,” said Anna.
Jeff also created a finance agent, which enabled people with particular roles to discuss topics like what payment plans would be good for certain tenants.
There was specific data loaded into Data Cloud, and the agent would serve up different types of information based on what role you were and what agent you wanted to interact with.
Anna said that the third employee agent, known as the ‘invocable’ agent, was something that most excited the competition judges, because it automated manual processes within Salesforce.
She told Salesforce Ben: “So, typically, it would take a long time to listen to a customer call, to write in the case details, to fill out the priority, the status-related bits of information – and we actually automated all of that.
“For example, say that it was a web-to-case or you had some sort of voice in play, it could be documented straight away and the case record can be created even without the agent having to do anything but sort of empathize and discuss with the customer.
“So basically highlighting the human side of the customer support role rather than the administrative side, which could be handled by the actual agent itself.”
One of the employee agents also triggered other processes, like issuing a safeguarding alert – a common practice in housing associations when there are concerns around topics such as health – which would trigger a certain record to be created, feeding into the relevant team’s queue.
Anna said: “That was quite an innovative use case because it’s about the administrative side of people’s role and stopping them from doing manual tasks, basically. So that was the third employee agent, which was invocable.”
The fourth agent was the service agent, which handled an Experience Cloud site that a tenant would connect to and have a chat in order to book and schedule maintenance appointments, “rather than spend large amounts of time on the phone”.
Jeff said that, for housing association employees, taking a call can be “quite stressful”, particularly when health issues or antisocial behaviour are involved, and their agentic solution allows staff to listen to a call and write the summary.
He added: “Sometimes the case wrap-up time is actually longer than the actual call itself, and then creation of other types of records. So, as Anna said… we did this on a safeguarding side site, but it could well have been a repair, it could have been a complaint, or anything else, and the agent would have picked that up.”
How to Win a Hackathon: Team ForceFront’s Advice
Following their victory, we asked Team ForceFront what advice they would have for someone looking to win a hackathon.
Jeff said: “Come up with a real life problem to solve – which I think we did. There’s a lot more in the solution than you see in the five minutes as well. I did actually build out quite a lot of additional things.
“I used a lot of Salesforce things in the background like Data Cloud, and I think the whole idea of the hackathon really is to show what’s possible within the platform. And also, what we can do going forward with integrations as well and just solving that real life problem in a way that makes things easier for users.”
He added that he started small, building the original employee agents first, getting to grips with them, and then building the case generation element, then once that was polished, moving onto the Experience Cloud site.
Anna said it was also crucial to get feedback on your submission.
She added: “Jeff knew people in the ecosystem that were very experienced from a development perspective, so if you can share it, then they can give you feedback and obviously working in a team where you’ve both got strengths and you can bounce off each other is really helpful for motivation and both being excited to take part.
“I mean that that helps a lot because I think we were like the only team that didn’t do this as part of our roles. All of this was done in our spare time. So that requires a different level of motivation. So it really makes a difference, I think, if you’re passionate about something.”
The team created everything after hours, working through vacation time, with 2AM finishes in parts. Both Anna and Jeff are contractors, and Jeff even took time out from his work to focus on the project.
Final Thoughts
A lot of time and passion went into Anna and Jeff’s solution, which, as Jeff points out, solves real life problems using Salesforce’s solutions.
Keep your idea simple, focus on an existing problem that needs solving or streamlining, and put in the hours – and you might be reading about your own success on Salesforce Ben sometime.
