CYBERLAB AI Hackathon 2026:Built with AI, Driven by Shared Expertise

On October 9 and 10, 2026, CYBERLAB team took part in the internal competition, CYBERLAB AI Hackathon 2026 in Novi Sad. Six mixed teams chose between two challenges (Company Brain and Ops Assistant) and had one shared goal: build a working solution with the help of AI, and learn from each other along the way. By Saturday evening, the demos were done, the votes were in, and one team was on its way to Off-road karting.

The hackathon was initiated by three colleagues: Adriano Maljković, Head of Development, Uroš Petrić, Software Engineer, and Ivan Inđić, DevOps Engineer, with the support of CYBERLAB as a company. Their idea was simple: give everyone a weekend to explore how AI changes the way we build software, and create space for people in different roles to share what they know. Even our CEO, Milan Gluhić, joined the hackathon as a participant.

We split into 6 teams, and the split was intentional. Every team brought together developers, DevOps engineers and colleagues from non-technical roles such as marketing, HR, project management and sales.

That mix meant every solution was looked at from more than one angle: how it is built, how it runs and how it would actually be used. It also meant that knowledge moved in every direction, not only from the most experienced engineers to everyone else.

Teams could choose between two challenges, both connected to Fornulio, CYBERLAB's own

work-optimization application:

• Company Brain: an internal AI assistant that knows what it doesn't know. Employees can ask anything about the company, from HR policies and benefits to their own remaining vacation days, and get an answer with a verifiable source. When the answer isn't available, it says so instead of guessing.
• Ops Assistant: an agent in Slack that fixes what it can prove. It picks up a bug report from Slack, checks it against the live system, writes the fix, runs the tests, and opens a pull request ready for human review, stopping where human judgment begins.

In both challenges, trust mattered more than coverage: a confident wrong answer counted as worse than no answer at all. Delivering the requirements was the baseline every team had to meet. Everything beyond that, from extra features to smarter ways of solving the same problem, earned points for innovation. That left plenty of room for teams to get creative and think like engineers beyond the brief.

The hackathon officially started with the** kick-off on Friday at 5 PM,** when every team got access to its GitHub repository. Some teams stayed and worked late into the night, determined to get as far as possible before the next day.

At 3 PM came the code freeze: whatever was on the main branch at that moment was what counted. Each team then had up to 10 minutes to demo its work, followed by voting and, in the evening, the award ceremony.

Scores came from two sources, added up into a final result:

• Participant voting: every participant voted individually and could not vote for their own team. In each category, they gave 3, 2 and 1 points to their top three teams.
• Jury scoring: the jury scored Presentation as an average of the jury members’ votes. Completeness and Innovation were evaluated by an AI agent with a skill built to measure them against the rules.

Teams competed in three categories, each with its own award:

• Completeness: the solution that most thoroughly implemented the requirements. The Completeness Champ title went to Merge conflict: Nemanja Radoičić, Dajana Jandrić, Dragan Perić, Marko Amidžić and Katarina Vasić.
• Innovation: the solution that met the requirements in an ingenious way or extended them sensibly. The Innovation Guru title went to HackaBoss: Milan Gluhić, Ljubiša Perić, Kristina Todorović, Nikola Kolović, Gordan Ćuić and Barbara Gagro.
• Presentation: the demo that best sold the team’s ideas, approaches and decisions. The Sales Rockstar title went to CDVita: Bojan Baškalo, Nataša Kovačević Gkaitatzis, Zoran Olujić, Ivana Gavrić and Tijana Mazinjanin.

The biggest title of the weekend, Hacky Overlord, went to the team with the best overall result: Merge conflict, with 305 points, ahead of HackaBoss (239) and CDVita (231). As overall winners, they earned an off-road karting experience.

Congratulations to all winners, and to every team that made it to the demo stage!

The CYBERLAB AI Hackathon 2026 gave us more than working prototypes. It showed how much we can learn when developers, DevOps engineers and non-technical colleagues solve the same problem together, with AI as part of the toolkit.

A big thank you to Adriano, Uroš and Ivan for starting this initiative, and to everyone who gave up part of their weekend to compete. Thank you to everyone who was part of this story!

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