After an hour of networking and delicious food, the Slack event kicked off with a short talk from Jim Ray, a developer advocate at Slack. He highlighted how Slack has embraced chatbots—and how they use Workbot, Workato’s completely customizable Slackbot, internally to solve real business problems.
Jim Ray, a developer advocate at Slack, talks about the company’s approach to bots.
Justin Ng, a Solutions Engineer at Workato, gave a comprehensive Workbot tutorial. From navigating the UI to building your first integration between Slack and another app, Justin guided attendees through every step. He even explained how to create recipes that account for complex business logic!
Justin Ng gives a comprehensive Workbot tutorial.
Then it was time to get to work! Five teams had 2.5 hours to ideate, build, and demo a custom Workbot. Along the way, Workato experts offered support, help, and motivation.
At the end of the hackathon, each team shared their creation. A panel of judges from Slack and Workato evaluated the final products based on execution, creativity, complexity, business value, and feasibility. After much deliberation, they narrowed it down to three winners.
A team collaborates on their project.
This winning team, from World Business Lenders, created several Workbot recipes that allow users to create and act on Zendesk tickets. Users can search for tickets, escalate issues, and respond to problems—without ever leaving Slack. For demonstrating excellent execution and clear business value, the team behind this workflow won $500 and a year of Workato’s Pro Plan, including Workbot.
Jayesh Shah, Workato’s VP of Customer Success, helps a team with their project.
This team designed a bot-based workflow for creating and assigning tasks in Trello, posting them to the appropriate board, assigning members to the card, and moving them through the correct sequence of columns as their status changes. This team impressed the judges with their implementation, taking home $500 and a six-month Workato Pro subscription.
There was even a prize for the most creative use case: a workflow that alerted team members of ticket assignments in Jira and Salesforce Service Cloud in Slack. This team’s highly imaginative workflow won them $200 and a three-month subscription to Workato’s Pro Plan.
Teams took home awesome swag, like these Workbot socks.
No one left empty-handed, however! Teams took home lots of great swag, including drones and Workbot socks. Most importantly, everyone learned how they can easily build a custom chatbot with Workato!