We recently hosted Sirdab’s first-ever Hackathon. Our talented teams showcased the spirit of innovation, collaboration, and creativity that makes Sirdab an exciting and rewarding place to work. Read on to learn about why and how we did it, as well as the projects that came out of it.

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AI is changing the economy

AI is rapidly changing how people work. Chatbots are handling 2/3s of customer support requests, agents are automating logistics manual data entry, and some estimate that half of all code will be written by AI by 2026. Moreover, AI is very accessible to non-engineers. PMs and tech savvy operators are using tools like Replit.com or Loveable.dev to build tools that help them and their coworkers daily without writing a single line of code or even knowing how to code.

At Sirdab, we hire people not just because they have specific technical skills (smart people can learn quickly), but also because of their judgment. Every team member is not only encouraged, but expected to take initiative and be bold and creative in their work.

So given how much impact AI can have on our business and the logistics industry as a whole, we asked ourselves the following questions:

• If we can cheaply hire an infinite number of very smart interns who are awake 24 hours a day and follow instructions reasonably well, what would we do with them?
• What aren’t we doing today because it’s too time consuming or effort-heavy or because you don’t know how to code?
• What are we doing today that could be offloaded to AI?
• What are new opportunities we can go after that were infeasible until recently?

We decided to have everyone in the company spend a day and a half to work on whatever they thought would have the highest impact or lead to the most interesting learnings. Not only would it yield great insights, but it’d be a ton of fun!

The rules of the Hackathon

1. People can work solo or in teams, with anyone they want from any department
2. People can work on whatever idea they like
3. The hackathon is a day and a half
4. While not required, we encourage the use of AI in some capacity, whether it’s in creating the project (eg: to vibecode a new feature) or in the final output (eg: to create an AI assistant).
5. Everyone who participated in the Hackathon presented what they did to the company. Demos highly encouraged.
6. There will be two awards after the presentation, one chosen by a panel of judges, and the other chosen by popular audience voting.

The projects

There were many amazing projects that came out of the event. Below are some of them:

“Rahaf” – AI Spot Rates Transportation Assistant

Sirdab started as a warehousing platform, and quickly evolved to offer transportation to our warehouse clients. Given the growth of our transportation offering, we wanted to make it extremely easy to use to promote growth.

It’s natural, therefore, that one of the Hackathon projects aimed to do just that.

Rahaf is an intuitive chatbot that converses naturally in the Saudi dialect. It effortlessly gathers essential information from prospects, provides transportation pricing on the spot, and even books the trip seamlessly upon customer approval. A true game-changer for transportation booking!

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“Simba” – Sirdab Merchant Personal Assistant

Our merchants often want to answer interesting questions about their inventory. Sometimes it’s natural to have pre-built UIs for the most common question, but it’s not always the case that we’ve pre-built UIs for every view of the data a merchant may want.

Simba empowers merchants with self-service analytics powered by AI. With instant, actionable insights at their fingertips, our merchants can now make data-driven decisions swiftly and efficiently.

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Auto-processing Partner Orders

Logistics is an extremely fragmented space with many players involved in the end-to-end lifecycle of powering a customer use case. As a result, a platform like Sirdab often needs to collect & consolidate event data from every player in the chain to present the customer with a unified view of what’s happening. This data consolidation is often manual which is time consuming, costly, and ultimately delays providing all the information to the client as soon as possible.

This project saw an opportunity to use AI to significantly reduce the time our operations team spends manually inputting context from PDFs, emails, whatsapp messages, and handwritten scans into our platform. The project used OCR and LLMs to parse data from these contexts and automatically input it into the platform. After this is deployed to production, the majority of partner order data will be populated on the Sirdab platform by AI, providing significant time savings for our ops team and improving the level of service we provide our clients without needing to increase headcount. A win-win-win!

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SDR AI Agent

Our SDR AI voice agent speaks fluently in the Saudi dialect, qualifying prospects, offering initial quotes, and immediately alerting our sales team of new opportunities. It’s like having an always-on, efficient sales team member!

For the demo, the AI SDR received a live call from one of the audience members, asked them various qualification questions, then gave the customer the information they need to move forward with Sirdab, and messaged the sales team about the qualified leads to help move them forward.

MANGO – Monitor, Analyze, Notify, Guide, Optimize

MANGO is an  alerting tool that tracks customer sentiment across various channels—customer support, reviews, and more. It proactively identifies opportunities or flags problems for our customer success and support teams to enhance customer satisfaction!

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Future Usage Predictor

This project solves a common painpoint we face in predicting demand. Sometimes our customers need to quickly increase their space utilization or ramp it down. To best serve them, it would help us to forecast how demand will change over time based on past customer behavior, and in which warehouses, so we can achieve optimal space utilization. To solve this, our resourceful ops team created a predictive model that predicts how much space a customer will need in the future, and compared the predictions against real historical data (seen in the screenshot below).

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Scheduling Orders

Our customers place bulk orders for fulfillment at their preferred timeslots. We’re proud to offer this level of flexibility for customers. But it creates an interesting operational challenges. How much staff should we have at a given time, and when should we begin preparing which orders? Wrong answers could cause problems, including warehouse worker overload during peak times, decreased productivity, and potential delays. So it’s very important we get this right!

To address this, the team leveraged AI to develop a smart scheduling solution. This innovative system considers factors like order size, target delivery times, and warehouse capacity to optimally allocate warehouse staff to fulfill orders at the time requested . The result is a more balanced workload, increased operational efficiency, reduced overtime, and overall improvement in warehouse team satisfaction.

Automated Picking Strategies

Using AI, we analyzed various picking strategies (FIFO, FEFO, LIFO) to automatically determine and implement the optimal method for every order. This approach significantly boosts operational efficiency and accuracy.

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Context-Aware Development with Cursor + MCP

Demonstrating impressive productivity gains, this project integrated MCPs from Sentry, Figma, and GitHub with Cursor. A simple prompt to Cursor like “do ticket 123” allowed the AI to autonomously execute tasks. This showed our whole engineering team exciting possibilities for how our dev workflows could evolve going forward.

What we learned

The biggest thing we learned is that: we definitely need to organize more Hackathons! It was an extremely productive use of time and showed us where we can quickly improve, and reinforced that every now and then, it’s extremely beneficial to put standard operating procedure to the side and go and try the most exciting sounding ideas with zero restrictions.

Not only was the event extremely fun and energizing for all involved, but we also plan to productionize a number of these projects so our customers, partners, and staff can reap the rewards.

Overall, the event was a huge success and we already look forward to the next one. Stay tuned for more updates.

If you’re looking to join a team where creativity and fun meet professional excellence, reach out from our careers page!

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