How to throw an effective promptathon

This ain’t your grandma’s hackathon…

Promptathons are one of the newest ways companies are engaging employees to deepen their understanding of GenAI tools.

Wait, what’s a promptathon? As ArmorCode CPO Mark Lambert told IT Brew, promptathons take the concept of hackathons, which task a group of people with solving coding challenges, and apply it to prompt engineering. Interest in these events comes as companies are trying to bolster AI adoption within their workforces to unlock productivity gains. A September 2025 AI Resume Builder survey found 58% of companies require at least some employees to use AI tools.

“Promptathons is the thing that those forward-looking companies are thinking about,” Lambert said.

But getting employees to use GenAI comes with challenges. According to Forrester, just over a quarter (26%) of employees knew what prompt engineering was and how to use it in 2025.

Tony Stewart, director of IT at Alithya, said that’s where promptathons come into play: the interactive challenges allow employees to practice writing prompts to build up those knowledge muscles.

“The best way to learn how to write a good prompt is to write a thousand really bad prompts,” Stewart said, adding that promptathons also provide a space for employees to share information with one another, whether that be good prompts they can leverage in their own workflows or ways they could apply GenAI in their roles.

The dos and don’ts of prompathon planning. What does it take to throw a promptathon that actually works as intended? Lambert said event organizers should provide employees with a “toolkit,” or an understanding of approved tools and datasets they can use during the competition.

“Don’t just say, ‘Here, go hog wild with anything,’ because what will happen during that promptathon is people are going to want to run it with real data,” he said.

Netskope Chief Digital and Information Officer Mike Anderson, who helped throw a promptathon for his organization in October 2025, said it can be beneficial to engage the entire leadership team, not just IT, for the event. For example, he found it useful to open up the judging panel to employees outside of Netskope’s IT department.

“We wanted the judges to be functional leaders in the organization, and then they would have a sense of ownership to bring their teams in and sponsor that,” Anderson said.

After hosting a promptathon event, Stewart said companies should be prepared to store and share some of the better prompts from it for employees to reference in the future.

“Don’t throw those out,” Stewart said. “Keep the really good ones and have a place where people can share them.”

What’s in it for IT? There are several benefits for IT pros who take ownership of promptathons at their organizations, according to Stewart, who said such events are typically championed by HR. First, it gives them an opportunity to aid in employees’ learning processes, including the awareness of what AI can do for them.

“A really successful promptathon generates a mile-long task list for an IT team,” Stewart said. “You want to be in that room and you want to help steer those conversations.”

Second, he added, promptathons can help employees see the IT department as GenAI “knowledge experts.”

“Even if they’re not using it in the same ways that other other departments are, they have a high onus to be wildly, wildly knowledgeable in this because they’re then responsible for how this is utilized,” Stewart said.