Why Bloomreach's Loomi Connect Hackathon Is Worth Your Week

By Kerrigan Baron, Delivery Lead for the AI Exchange at the MACH Alliance

The fastest way to learn agentic AI is to build an agent. Not read about one. Not architect one. Build one. That's why I keep coming back to hackathons as the format that actually moves people forward. It's also why I'm telling you to register for this one.

From May 26 to June 3, Bloomreach is running the Loomi Connect AI Hackathon. It's virtual, asynchronous, and open to anyone curious about agentic AI. Co-hosted with Google, AWS, PayPal, and the MACH Alliance.

What you're actually building

Loomi Connect is Bloomreach's agentic platform layer. It lets AI agents orchestrate capabilities across Marketing, Analytics, Search, and Commerce, and extend them with your own tools, data, and external systems. So you're not building chat wrappers. You're building agents that detect signals, make decisions, and trigger action across connected systems.

Grand prize is a fully sponsored trip to Bloomreach's Edge Summit. LA or London. Your call.

This is for everyone. I mean that.

The thing I want to be loud about. This hackathon is for everyone. AI curious. Power user. Analysts, PMs, designers, strategists, developers. If you've never written a prompt, you belong here. If you've shipped production agents, you belong here too.

I've run and supported hackathons across the AI Exchange where someone showed up having barely prompted before and walked out with a working agent. I've also watched seasoned builders ship things their day jobs wouldn't have given them room to try. Both happen. They happen because hackathons are built for trial and error, and trial and error is how humans actually learn technical things. Tutorials teach you the steps. Hackathons teach you the judgment.

Prompting is a fine starting place. It's the on-ramp. The point of the week is to take what you can do on day one and push it somewhere new by day eight.

Bloomreach has team-matching built in, so if you don't have people to build with, you'll be matched. If you don't know where to start, there are resources and support in place. Show up curious. The rest figures itself out.

Two Audiences, One Shared Challenge

The thing I want to be loud about. This hackathon is for everyone. AI curious. Power user. Analysts, PMs, designers, strategists, developers. If you've never written a prompt, you belong here. If you've shipped production agents, you belong here too.

I've run and supported hackathons across the AI Exchange where someone showed up having barely prompted before and walked out with a working agent. I've also watched seasoned builders ship things their day jobs wouldn't have given them room to try. Both happen. They happen because hackathons are built for trial and error, and trial and error is how humans actually learn technical things. Tutorials teach you the steps. Hackathons teach you the judgment.

Prompting is a fine starting place. It's the on-ramp. The point of the week is to take what you can do on day one and push it somewhere new by day eight.

Bloomreach has team-matching built in, so if you don't have people to build with, you'll be matched. If you don't know where to start, there are resources and support in place. Show up curious. The rest figures itself out.

The initiative is designed to serve both — not with one-size-fits-all outputs, but with content and artifacts calibrated to the specific job each person is trying to do.

Why the AI Exchange cares

The AI Exchange exists to move agentic AI from theory to working systems across the MACH ecosystem. Hackathons are one of the cleanest ways we do that. At MACH X: London in Fall 2025, we showcased four hackathon proof-of-concepts that are now open source. At MACH X: Toronto this year, we ran new builds with Wegmans and IPSY that pushed on what agentic commerce can actually do. MACH X: Amsterdam is up next this September 28-29, with a fresh round of brand hackathons coming with it.

The pattern is consistent. Real brands. Real problems. Real builds in a tight window. People learn more in one week of hands-on building than in three months of conference sessions. Loomi Connect is the next one. Bloomreach is putting a real platform layer in front of the community and asking builders to push on it. That's worth your time.

If you've been waiting for a reason to stop talking about agentic AI and start shipping it, this is it.