How do you boost AI use? Try promptathons

You’ve heard of prom season…but have you heard of its AI counterpart: prompt season?

In October 2025, cloud-native security platform company Netskope held its inaugural prompathon, where it gathered more than 600 willing employees to show off their best prompting skills and discover new use cases for internally approved AI tools.

IT Brew caught up with Netskope Chief Digital and Information Officer Mike Anderson, who told us that the company, after finding limited employee use of its AI tools, decided to take a unique approach to boosting AI fluency and adoption.

“A lot of people didn’t even know that they had access to Gemini, because we all know that people don’t read emails…so we knew we had to do something different,” Anderson said. In addition to anemic AI usage among their respective workforces, companies have been struggling to unlock productivity gains from the tools. For example, a January report from AI transformation company Section found 85% of employees don’t have an AI use case that delivers business value. IT Brew previously reported on how companies have been mandating AI use in hopes of driving productivity.

Day planner. Planning for Netskope’s promptathon took two months, according to Anderson, who added that the company formed a dedicated cross-functional team to spearhead the event. Participating employees had two weeks to build out their submissions and their capabilities with tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and NotebookLM. On the day of the event, IT employees were noticeably absent from the judging panel—a deliberate move by the company.

“I intentionally wasn’t a judge because I wanted to allow people that were in other functions to kind of see the innovation that came out,” he said, adding that the company coined the event a “promptathon” as opposed to a “hackathon” to attract non-technical employees.

“When you try to recruit people across your organization to participate, a lot of times, you may get more engineers than you do people that are at other functions in the organization,” Anderson said. “So, there was some intentionality there.”

Lasting impression. Netskope’s inaugural promptathon garnered participants from 17 different departments who submitted more than 90 project submissions. Anderson recalled several innovative use cases for AI tools generated by employees during the event, including automated QA testing and an AI-enabled knowledge hub to assist solution engineers with demoing Netskope’s product to customers.

“Instead of having to reach out to someone that was a subject matter expert and say, ‘How do I demo this product?’, you could basically go to the shareable Gem [Gemini’s customized AI assistants] and ask the questions, and it would give you step-by-step instructions, screen-by-screen on what you need to do to do that demo,” he said.

Netskope had around 700 weekly Gemini AI users prior to its promptathon. Following the event, that number jumped to 1,500 weekly users and kept growing.

“We’ve seen a lot of adoption,” Anderson said. “I would say we probably have close to 1,000 shareable gems across the organization today that people have created.”

Anderson added that Netskope employees are already looking forward to the next event, which Netskope plans to host in June. This time, the theme will focus on agents, and challenge employees to build out internal agents that can assist with specific functions.

“The next one will be even better than the last one and we’ll learn a lot,” Anderson said. “We’ll integrate that into it, and we’ll do the next one. Maybe someday, agents will run their own promptathons, and they’ll coordinate it all [to] make it real easy for everybody.”