This winter, teams across our Digital & Technology organization came together for Levi Strauss & Co.’s first fully AI-focused hackathon.
This hackathon wasn’t just about competing to see who could create the winning project, however. It was designed as a capstone to our company-wide AI learning and training work, giving teams the chance to take what they’ve been learning about AI and push the boundaries of what they thought was possible — regardless of their role or technical background.
More than 40 teams participated, and all were required to use AI. And use AI they did, incorporating it into every step of their work — from creating their project’s prototype to developing highly polished pitch video submissions and presentations that brought their ideas to life.
One thing became clear during the hackathon: AI was enhancing — not replacing — team members’ expertise.
AI gave everyone access to capabilities that would normally require specialized skills and years of training, allowing them to stretch far beyond their defined roles. Non-technical product managers were building functional prototypes. Commercial team stakeholders were contributing to technical solutions. Engineers were creating and presenting polished presentations with compelling narratives explaining the features and how they supported business initiatives.
The end result? Incredibly high-quality projects — and a very tough task for our Digital & Technology leadership team, who had to pick a winning team from 10 semi-finalists.
In the end, though, there could only be one winner, and that honor went to Team Kaizen — Abhinav Srivastava and Abhik Das. The duo created a prototype of a feature for Levi.com called Imagine on Me, which uses generative AI to help shoppers “try on” a product on the website and see how it looks on them versus the model — increasing shopper satisfaction and conversion rates while reducing return rates, a key unlock for the business.
As the winning team, Kaizen’s Imagine on Me feature is now being incorporated into the Digital & Technology team’s roadmap.
The other finalists were:
- Second Place: Team FrostByte — Scott Neeb, Shantanu Mishra, Luiz Palomo, Ronak Chaudhary, Kishalay Ghosh
- Third Place: Team FitTech Squad — Gopinath Chandrasekaran, Sirisha Rowtula, Kavitha Sivaprakasam, Janani Elango, Supriya E Hari
- Team AI Alchemist — Prabir Nandi, Sagar Karvir, Jaydev Mandaliya, Raul Medina
- Team Barcode Breakers — Neeraj Kumar Shukla, Ravi Tej Urikiti, Ankit Kumar Singh, Abhishek Vinod, Henrry Lorenzo Nadal
- Team FIA (Fashion Intelligence Agents) — Mallika Gupta, Mohammed Farooq, Pavan Upadhya, Ruthuvesh Recharla, Savy Chandra Kumar, Surojit Guha
- Team Hackstreet Boys — Alan Pedraza, Avi Rose, Antonio Valencia
- Team Next Iteration — Jimmy Somarajan, Varun Bhambri, Gobinder Kamboj, Amanda Chand
- Team Super Mario World — Davide Salvaggio, Serena Garuti, Simone Gayed Said, Massimo Mochetti, Matteo Rontauroli
- Team Yoshikaa — Shivakumar Rajamanickam, Yogesh Mahale, Kartik Shah, Abhik Das
“Thank you to everyone who participated in this hackathon. Your creativity, dedication and willingness to jump in and experiment with new technologies and reimagine what’s possible is exactly what we need to be a frontier firm in AI adoption,” said David Brunelle, SVP of Engineering at LS&Co. “This hackathon demonstrated how AI can break down silos and exemplified how AI will help accelerate our evolution into a best-in-class DTC-first retailer.”
