SharkNinja’s big bet on AI: 4-day AI hackathon

The team has reached an impasse.

Someone brought in a recent hire from another team, one of SharkNinja’s emerging AI power users.

In about 90 minutes, we built an AI tool that automates the tedious process of tracking projects and holding teams accountable.

Mark Barrocas, CEO of Shark Ninja, said word of the employee’s accomplishments spread beyond the group gathered at the company’s headquarters near Boston.

To Mr. Baroccas, who has contributed to the company’s transformation for nearly 20 years. The moment when an infomercial-era curiosity turned into a consumer products behemoth captured something much bigger going on inside the company.

“AI is the great equalizer,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a college student or a senior vice president. In fact, you can contribute at the same level.”

But earlier this year, Barrocas was concerned that too few employees were experiencing AI breakthroughs. While some employees were fully committed to technology, others seemed to be taking a step back. To close the gap, he decided to “shock the system” by significantly suspending normal operations and immersing the company in a four-day AI hackathon.

The closure was an unprecedented move for the company behind the Ninja Creami ice cream maker of TikTok fame and Shark ChillPill, a personal cooler backed by Justin Bieber. Four days had passed and it felt like the company was moving towards a deadline at breakneck speed.

“We are in uncharted territory,” Baroccas said during the hack. “We don’t know what will work.”

“If it ain’t broke, break it.”

At SharkNinja’s headquarters, where vacuum cleaner handles jut above cubicle walls like reeds in a swamp, leaders assembled a team of roughly 10 to 15 employees from across the company to tackle about 20 major initiatives.

This spring’s event, called “Jailbreak,” was an expanded version of the hack the company started hosting a decade ago.

Bosses encouraged employees whose jobs required less coordination between teams to come up with challenges for their departments, resulting in about 400 additional projects, Barocas said.

To commemorate the week, a giant banner hung in the two-story lobby atrium proclaimed, “If it ain’t broke, tear it down.”

Employees from different parts of the business collaborated on projects, sometimes with colleagues they had never met. Dozens of college students from the Boston area participated. I participated A companion event aimed at developing participants’ skills and helping SharkNinja find potential new employees.

The idea was to identify practical ways the company could incorporate AI into its business, from product development and marketing to supply chain planning.

One group demonstrated a tool that can collect consumer feedback around the world, including on social media, and categorize it by country and demographic group.

Another team spent part of the week using AI to generate ideas and prototypes, then built two new products, connected them to the cloud, and built an accompanying app with recipes.

“Work that used to take months or even quarters is now completed in days,” the employee said.

At one conference room table, laptops were clustered around a cluster of water bottles. Across the hall, Shark fans and air purifiers were blaring loudly in a packed conference room.

One group worked on an AI tool that can evaluate product concepts and suggest improvements by analyzing factors such as consumer demand, manufacturing feasibility, and business potential.

That’s important because the company, which had sales of about $6.4 billion last year, typically launches 25 products a year, including the viral hit Shark FlexStyle hair styling gadget and frozen drink maker Ninja Slushi.

This week’s AI push wasn’t limited to product design.

For Kaitlyn Hebert, CMO of a global brand, an important project focused on finding out what makes products break on social media. In her group’s hacking case, that meant bringing together product developers and marketers to build a reproducible playbook.

“A lot of people believe that virality is luck, but here I think we know how to design for virality,” she said.

Hackathons instead of consultants

About a year ago, Baroccas said he kept hearing the same advice: “Hire a consultant to help develop your AI strategy.”

Like many other leaders, he met with CEOs of consulting and technology companies. He joked that in those conversations, the word “agent” comes up multiple times in the same sentence.

The more Barrocas listened, the more he became skeptical that an army of consultants would be able to teach SharkNinja how to use AI.

“After three months, that strategy is likely to be outdated,” Baroccas said.

Around the same time, we started noticing managers and senior managers sharing different ways to use AI to solve problems.

“They’ll say, ‘Who told you to do this?'” Baroccas said. “They’ll say, ‘There’s no one.'”

They weren’t waiting for a corporate AI roadmap. That observation became the basis for the jailbreak.

“We already had this culture here, what we call ‘find the problem and solve the problem,'” Baroccas said.

What’s different now, he says, is that employees suddenly have a new set of tools.

“A year or two ago, we would have said, ‘Oh, IT has to fix the system,'” Barrocas says. “Now it’s like, ‘We have a problem. We can solve the problem.'”

Jailbreak is about more than just building tools using AI. He said the move was to get the company’s roughly 4,000 employees to adapt and move in the same direction.

“Our job is to leave no one behind,” Baroccas said.

Technology and startup energy, the roots of a consumer electronics company

During the week, the atmosphere was festive, with balloons climbing up the stair railings and framed doorways. In the common area, a giant Lite-Brite-like display lit up with the words “Jailbreak.”

Near the lobby, the beauty team offered touch-ups using SharkNinja products to employees who wanted their headshots taken by a professional photographer.

Around lunchtime, some employees streamed outside to the food trucks brought in for the event, while others filed into the cafeteria, Shark Cutie, named after an employee’s contest-winning creation.

Giant Connect Four, Jenga, and Chess installations were set up in hallways and common areas. In one instance, several workers were walking across a mini-golf facility.

The atmosphere was lively, but the stakes were high. SharkNinja plans to award $1 million in prizes in 2026 to workers or groups of workers who develop big ideas in AI. It has already cut several employees’ bonus checks by $20,000.

In the central hallway, beyond dozens of product development labs that are off-limits to visitors, a coffee maker and a bladeless tower fan sit on pedestals under spotlights, like exhibits in a museum dedicated to household appliances.

For a company that sells blenders and vacuum cleaners rather than software, it felt more like a tech giant than a traditional consumer products maker.

Barrocas said he doesn’t want AI expertise to be concentrated in the hands of a few enthusiasts. He wants thousands of employees to try out the technology and discover how it can improve their work.

“We’re not a technology company,” Baroccas said. “We are a problem-solving company.”