Become a Manager of Artificial Intelligence as you learn to Work with Aliens

Each person works as the CEO of a start-up with a team of several AIs, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral and DeepSeek. At the start she gives all of them the same task, a kind of job interview, and works on with the best of them for the rest of the day. Nobody can hide behind others. The people who trust themselves least often build the most surprising solution.

Whoever brings an idea sharpens it in the morning. Whoever brings none finds one on the spot: a problem in society or in their own surroundings that could be solved, but for which nobody has seen a way out so far. We deliberately hand out no ideas. Under the pressure of the day, people get creative.

Everyone knows from the start that at 15:30 they will stand in front of the group for three minutes: 30 seconds for the problem, two and a half minutes for the solution. Then everyone ranks their first, second and third place on paper slips, and we count the points in front of the group on a tally sheet. The best get small, symbolic prizes, and we close with a group photo. With more than 15 participants, everyone pitches first in groups, and the best reach the final.

The AI Nerds are no jury. The participants decide themselves, democratically, who among them has the best solution. The AI Nerds walk around all day, help, and keep the pitches moving. They need not have founded anything. They are people who use AI a lot and like trying new things with it. Our message to the participants: we are no high-flyers, just normal people who are a few months ahead of you. You can become an AI Nerd too, and easily.

The shorter the onboarding block on the day, the better we prepare it. We agree on the tools in advance, and every participant gets a short guide so the accounts run on the morning itself.

Everyone sends us their prompts after the day. We check them and issue the certificates. A certificate goes to whoever meets three conditions.

1. The first prompt is an own, long prompt: own words, own problem. Asking the AI to invent a problem and then solve it does not count.
2. The prompts show that the person did not simply believe the AI. She tinkered, compared answers and worked creatively, and she went back and forth with the AIs as the CEO of her start-up of humans and AIs.
3. The person pitched for three minutes. The pitch need not be good, but it must take place.

The vote on the winners is separate from the certificate. Usually about one in ten participants misses the certificate at the first attempt. Whoever misses it can take an individual make-up session within two weeks; in the end, nearly everyone who makes an effort gets it.

We offer three types of AI training: lectures, one-day workshops and hackathons, and a six-week course in which participants build and deploy their own AI agents.

In 2023 the question was how to get access to AI. In 2026 the leaders we train ask a different one: who controls it? Teams are shifting to open-source models they can run on their own terms, keeping their data, their prompts and their hard-won know-how in the house. Palantir's Alex Karp put it bluntly on CNBC in July 2026:

What the technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production. It's not being transferred to someone else.

That is why our menu now runs from your team's first productive hour with AI all the way to agents, open models, local use and your own AI infrastructure, including a dedicated Open Source AI workshop and a practical EU AI Act and GDPR format.

Who is an AI hackathon for?

Firms, universities and regional business agencies that want their people to use AI well. Nobody needs to know how to code. We have run them for contact centres, software firms, universities, foundations and whole ecosystems, in Germany, the UK, South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia.

How long does it take, and how many people?

One day, from 9 to 17, for 15 to 150 people. The largest so far had 154 participants. Groups above 15 pitch in rounds, and the final never has more than ten pitches.

What does it cost?

Prices on request. Firms, universities and regional business agencies book single hackathons or packages of five, ten or twenty. Write to elvis@meliacred.com with the number of people, the place and a possible date.

Does it count as AI literacy training under Article 4 of the EU AI Act?

The day is built for that purpose: participants learn what the leading models can and cannot do, build a prototype on their own problem, and learn why language models can be dangerous to users and how to safeguard against it. Everyone who meets the three conditions receives a performance certificate, which documents the training.

In which languages?

English and German. The German hackathon page is at meliacred.com/de/hackathons.

What do participants say?

133 participants have written about their day on LinkedIn; every quote on this site links to the original post. The deck at the top of this page shows them all.

What happens after the day?

Participants send us their prompts, we check them and issue the performance certificates. Those who want to go further join the 42-day agent course, a weekly night school in which they build and deploy their own AI agents.

Elvis has led more than 70 AI workshops and hackathons in the last three years, in Germany, the UK, South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia. His largest hackathon had 154 participants. He studied at the University of Duisburg-Essen and has worked with researchers in Oxford and Bonn on what AI means for services industries. He is no programmer and does not claim to build AI. In this context that does not matter: a hackathon is about applying AI, and the best AI users are often not classic IT people.

Firms, universities and regional business agencies book single hackathons or packages of five, ten or twenty. Prices on request.

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