SharkNinja’s Big AI Bet: a 4-Day AI Hackathon

The team was stuck.

Someone called over a recent hire from another team — one of SharkNinja’s emerging AI power users.

Within about 90 minutes, he had built an AI tool that automated a cumbersome process for tracking projects and holding teams accountable.

Word of the worker’s feat spread beyond the group gathered around him in an office at the company’s headquarters near Boston, said SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas.

For Barrocas, who has spent nearly two decades helping transform the company from an infomercial-era curiosity into a consumer-products juggernaut, the moment captured something larger happening inside the company.

“AI is the great equalizer,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a college kid or a senior vice president. You actually can contribute at a similar level.”

Yet earlier this year, Barrocas worried that too few employees were experiencing that AI breakthrough. Some workers had gone all in on the technology, while others seemed to be hanging back. To close the gap, he decided to “shock the system” by largely pausing normal work and immersing the company in a four-day AI hackathon.

The shutdown was an unprecedented move at the company behind the TikTok-famous Ninja Creami ice cream maker and Justin Bieber-backed Shark ChillPill personal cooler. Four days in, it felt like the company was hurtling toward a deadline.

“We’re in uncharted territories,” Barrocas said during the hack. “We have no idea what’s going to work.”

‘If it ain’t broke, break it’

At SharkNinja’s headquarters, where vacuum handles poke above cubicle walls like reeds in a marsh, leaders assembled teams of roughly 10 to 15 employees from across the company to tackle about 20 major initiatives.

The springtime event, called “Jailbreak,” was a bigger version of the hacks the company began hosting a decade ago.

Bosses encouraged employees whose work didn’t require much coordination across teams to come up with challenges for their own departments, resulting in about 400 additional projects, Barrocas said.

To mark the week, a giant banner hanging in a two-story lobby atrium declared: “If it ain’t broke, break it.”

Employees from different parts of the business worked side by side on projects, sometimes with colleagues they had never met. Dozens of college students from the Boston area also joined in a related event designed to develop participants’ skills and help SharkNinja spot potential recruits.

The idea was to identify practical ways the company could weave AI into its business, from product development and marketing to supply chain planning.

One group demonstrated tools that could mine consumer feedback from around the world — including from social media — and sort it by country or demographic group.

Another team spent part of the week using AI to generate ideas and prototypes — and then build — two new products, connect them to the cloud, and build accompanying apps populated with recipes.

“What used to take months and quarters, in some cases, is now taking a matter of days,” an employee said.

On one conference-room table, laptops crowded around a cluster of water bottles. Down the hall, Shark fans and air purifiers hummed at full blast inside a packed meeting room.

One group worked on an AI tool that could rate product concepts and suggest improvements by analyzing factors such as consumer demand, manufacturing feasibility, and business potential.

That matters because the company, whose sales rose to nearly $6.4 billion last year, typically introduces 25 products a year, including the viral hits Shark FlexStyle hair-styling gadget and the Ninja Slushi frozen-drink maker.

The week’s AI push wasn’t limited to product design.

For Kaitlyn Hebert, CMO of global brands, a key project focused on nailing down what makes products break through on social media. For her group’s hack, that meant bringing together product developers and marketers to build a repeatable playbook.

“A lot of people believe virality is luck, but I think here we know how to design virality,” she said.

A hackathon instead of consultants

About a year ago, Barrocas said, he kept hearing the same advice: Bring in consultants to help develop an AI strategy.

Like many other leaders, he met with consulting firms and CEOs of tech companies. In those conversations, he joked, he would hear the word “agentic” several times in the same sentence.

The more Barrocas listened, the more skeptical he became that an army of consultants could tell SharkNinja how to use AI.

“Odds are that strategy is outdated, you know, three months later,” Barrocas said.

Around the same time, he started noticing that managers or senior managers were sharing different ways they were using AI to solve problems.

“I would say, ‘Who told you to do this?'” Barrocas said. “They would say, ‘Nobody.'”

They weren’t waiting for a corporate AI road map. That observation became the foundation for Jailbreak.

“We already had this culture here — what we call ‘finding problems, fixing problems,'” Barrocas said.

The difference now, he said, is that employees suddenly have a new set of tools.

“A year or two ago, you would say, ‘Oh, well, IT has to fix the system,'” Barrocas said. “Now it’s like, ‘I have a problem. I can fix the problem.'”

The goal of Jailbreak wasn’t simply to build tools using AI. It was to get the company’s roughly 4,000 workers to adapt and move in the same direction, he said.

“Our job,” Barrocas said, “is to not leave anyone behind.”

Tech-startup energy, appliance-company roots

During the week, the atmosphere became festival-like: Balloons climbed stair railings and framed doorways. In a common area, a display that looked like a massive Lite-Brite glowed with the word “Jailbreak.”

Near a lobby, beauty teams offered touch-ups using SharkNinja products to workers who wanted a professional photographer to take their headshots.

Around lunchtime, some workers drifted outside to food trucks brought in for the event, while others filed into Sharkcuterie, a cafeteria named after an employee’s winning contest entry.

Huge Connect Four, Jenga, and chess installations stood in hallways and in common areas. In one, handfuls of workers traversed a mini-golf setup.

The atmosphere was lively, yet the stakes were high. SharkNinja is awarding $1 million in prizes in 2026 to workers or groups of workers who develop big AI ideas. It’s already cut $20,000 bonus checks for several workers.

Beyond dozens of product-development labs off-limits to visitors, in a central hallway, a coffee maker and a bladeless tower fan sat on pedestals under spotlights, like exhibits in a museum devoted to home gadgets.

For a company that sells blenders and vacuums rather than software, the atmosphere felt closer to that of a tech giant than to a traditional consumer-products manufacturer.

Barrocas said he doesn’t want AI expertise concentrated among a handful of enthusiasts. He wants thousands of employees to experiment with the technology and figure out how it could improve their work.

“We’re not a tech company,” Barrocas said. “We’re a problem-solving company.”