Who in their right minds spends their first night at a busy conference hacking solutions to real-world problems? Your Hackathon teams, that's who! And this year, they showed up in force.
121 participants. 35 teams registered. 26 completed applications submitted. If you've ever tried to ship a real working app in 8 hours on conference WiFi surrounded by people eating pizza, you already know what kind of grit that number represents. This article is a celebration of our hackathon teams and the ones that topped the list this year.
How the Format Actually Worked
The CreatorCon Hackathon at Knowledge 2026 ran four categories simultaneously. Three were 8-hour open-ended challenges: Hack4Good (apps with social impact), Hack4Work (workplace and enterprise productivity), and Hack4Fun (games, creativity, entertainment, and yes, that counts). Teams in those tracks got a broad theme and wide creative latitude.
The fourth category was brand new this year: Hack4. Four hours. One prescriptive prompt. No vague "build something cool" brief. Teams were handed a specific scenario: design a zombie apocalypse emergency response platform covering six defined modules: zones, rescue dispatch, civilian intake, quarantine, supplies, and live dashboards. The format was designed for people who couldn't commit a full evening — and the time constraint wasn't the only challenge. Teams in this category were also attempting to complete six distinct modules that addressed different aspects of emergency response.
Out of our teams competing in these four categories:
- 1 earned an Honorable Mention
- 9 were selected as Finalists
- From those finalists, 4 were chosen as Category Winners
- And from those, 1 team was selected as the Overall Winner
Winners
Overall and Hack4Good Winner: Free Food 4 You
Team 404 Brain Not Found — Free Food 4 You
Craig Talbert, Eric LeMonnier, Howard Kinyon, Kalisha Moore, and Shanaun Clayton
Team 404 Brain Not Found built a platform that connects community members to nearby food pantries through a location-aware public portal. Community members get a simple location-aware app: find a pantry near you, see what's available, show up. Food pantry operators get a dedicated management portal to track inventory, log shipments, and coordinate distributions. The two halves meet in the middle.
Hack4 Winner: Zombie Survival
Team AceKnow26 — Zombie Survival
Ajay Vuppala, Angela Quach, Edgardo Fabian Amaya Mendoza, Rachid Harrando, and Rampriya Sundaramoorthy
Every team in this category attempted to cover all six modules. AceKnow26 did that, and then made one design decision that really set them apart: a public portal for civilians that requires no ServiceNow account. Members of the public can check in and request help without creating an account, without any of the friction that usually blocks non-employees from platform-built apps. On top of that, Moveworks AI agents handle dispatch and civilian routing across the operational stack. The result is a unified emergency operations platform that works for both the people running the response and the people who need it.
Hack4Work Winner: RTO Cost Calculator
Team Nodi Golem — RTO Cost Calculator
J L, Juan Pablo Gomez, and Mujeeb Qasimi
Nodi Golem decided opinions about return-to-office weren't enough and built the math. RTO Cost Calculator geocodes every employee's home address, calculates real driving routes using the Google Distance Matrix API (not straight-line estimates), and surfaces the true cost of an RTO policy in dollars spent on gas, gallons burned, hours lost, and miles driven. It's the kind of app that turns "we think this is fine" into "here are the numbers."
Hack4Fun Winner: JeopardyNOW!
Team We Ball — JeopardyNOW!
AJ Bayerl, Cy Bunayog, Melvin Kurian, and Stephen Ng
Employees don't read the Knowledge Base. We Ball decided to weaponize that. JeopardyNOW! is a multiplayer trivia game where an AI host built on Now Assist pulls live KB articles and generates Jeopardy-style questions on the fly, running real-time buzzers, streaks, and dishes out public humiliation to make people actually engage with KB content. Zero external dependencies. The fact that it works is impressive. The fact that it might actually get people to read KB articles is either a miracle or a very clever trap. The fact that it verbally roasts you when you get answers wrong... the stuff of legend.
The Finalists
Every finalist team here cleared our preliminary judging panel, earning a coveted spot in our finalist judging round.
Hack4Good Finalists
MealBridge — Team: The Update Set
Henry Hartanto, John Lacanlale, Kevin Brown, Mahwish Subzwari, and Poorna Chand Davuluri
The Update Set built a real-time food rescue coordination platform. The app uses AI to match surplus food donors to pantries based on proximity, capacity, and need, with 5-minute SLA monitoring on volunteer dispatch. The detail that stuck with me: food-insecure recipients can reserve meals using only a phone number, no account required. Dignity by design.
ReachNow — Team: brightfin
Andrii Chaus, Jonathan Salazar, Kateryna Kychygina, Kristina Todd, and Reece Poulsen
brightfin tackled a pain point for non-profits that often goes unspoken: proving it. ReachNow gives smaller organizations the kind of fund utilization reporting, donor accountability, and inventory visibility that usually only comes with enterprise budgets. The organizations that need it most are the ones who can't afford it. brightfin solved that.
Hack4 Finalist
Byte Me Zombie — Team: Now Vibe Coders
Ajay Kumar, Janaki Priyanka Gandikota, Shreya Wani, Srinija Amisthapur, and Yaswanth Reddy Kurre
Now Vibe Coders hit all six required modules and kept going. Threat intelligence and mission coordination on top of the spec. Every manual handoff replaced with automated flows. In four hours.
Hack4Work Finalist
Scout — AI Intelligence — Team: Chaos to Now
Joshton Fernandes
Chaos to Now converts noisy platform and operational signals into actionable intelligence using rule-based pattern correlation. Think: a spike in failed login events becomes a prioritized, readable alert instead of a log entry nobody acts on. Full audit trail. Feedback loop closure.
Hack4Fun Finalist
Tower Defense — Team: Bob Dole
Adam Taifouri and Mark Endsley
Bob Dole built a tower defense game on the ServiceNow platform. If you've been to a hackathon before, you know "we're building a game" on the platform is always a fun gamble. Two people built it. They shipped it. Their tower stood strong into the finals.
Honorable Mention: Women Beyond Walls
Women Beyond Walls — Team: NowSisters
Isela Phelps, Jillian Howell, Mahathi Veena R, Selva Arun, and Shalin Baier
NowSisters built a platform connecting incarcerated women with volunteer educators. The scope of what they tackled in Hack4Good is worth slowing down for:
- Stripe Identity API verifies educator volunteers in seconds, so facilities aren't relying on slow manual background check processes.
- Configured role-based ACLs lock down sensitive facility data so only the right people see what they need to see.
- An AI agent built in AI Agent Studio screens submitted class proposals for safety risks before they ever reach a facility administrator. Scissors, chemicals, anything flagged gets routed for human review first.
- A conversational AI Learning Navigator helps incarcerated women find and enroll in education classes without navigating a form-based system.
Even though this one didn't quite make the finals, it definitely won our hearts and impressed us with their execution of the app.
Every Team That Crossed the Finish Line
Completing a hackathon by submitting an app is an accomplishment all on its own. So let's not miss the opportunity to celebrate the 16 other teams who delivered.
3CLogic — FoodConnect4Good (Hack4Good)
Amarveer Singh, Chitwan Malhotra, Guillaume Seynhaeve, Rahul MalhotraBridges food waste and food insecurity using ServiceNow's logistics engine. Tracks live inventory across pantries, matches donor surplus from restaurants and schools to immediate demand, and coordinates volunteer pickups.
50cent — Garage Synapse (Hack4Work)
Abdellah Tahri, Errahmani Mostafa, Jimmy Catherine, Ludovic Blanchet, Pierre-Marie Chaumien
A VIN-centric automotive after-sales platform that shifts garages from reactive service to predictive maintenance. Continuously analyzes vehicle and customer data to anticipate maintenance needs and personalize the service experience across the vehicle lifecycle.
AgenticStudents — MealFirst (Hack4Good)
Bharath Kumar Shivakumar, Eunsu Cho, Lewi Gao, Meghna Paul, Ramiro Garcia Punaro
Connects time-sensitive food surplus to real demand in minutes. Donors and volunteers use Moveworks chat; ServiceNow handles the matching, tasking, and tracking so "10 trays by 6pm" becomes an auto-assigned pickup task.
ClaudeOrNot — Survival Pro (Hack4)
Amitoj Wadhera, Deepankar Mathur, Mohammed Usama, Sayantan Gupta, Sourav Singh
A ServiceNow-native ops center for multi-district crisis management. Automates zone routing, rescue dispatch, civilian triage, supply reordering, and quarantine case management using Flow Designer, Now Assist for AI triage, and Moveworks as the field-responder front door.
DDC Squad — ApocalypseNow (Hack4)
Austin Brunet, Justin Nelson, Kostya Bazanov, Patrick Bretelson
A centralized command platform for coordinating citywide outbreak response when districts collapse and leadership activates the Emergency Response Protocol.
Fluent Gliders — PTO Organizer (Hack4Good)
Drea Shumate, Harneetsingh Sital, Ishaan Shoor
A non-profit app for Parent Teacher Organizations that replaces the usual mess of emails, spreadsheets, and group chats with one digital workspace. Built for non-technical users to organize events, manage fundraising, coordinate volunteers, and handle communications.
Infliction Point — Chaos to Control (Hack4Work)
Rajeev Sanam
A solo build tackling alert fatigue in enterprise IT operations. When 14 alerts fire because one Oracle DB cluster failed, this app cuts through the noise and surfaces the one that actually requires action.
KANE — CTRL+ALT+DEFEAT THE UNDEAD (Hack4)
Alyssa Boese, Arun Chary Karnakanti, Chris Schuh, Joe Brazell, Mary Hunter
Triage and quarantine management for a zombie outbreak, built on ServiceNow during the four-hour window.
Legends26 — Table Upload Request (Hack4Work)
Cecilia Manolov, Harry Hartanto, Hendro Hartanto, Miguel Flores, Santi Lauw
Honors the people who do manual data entry by saving them from it. Streamlines table upload requests so heroes who don't wear capes can spend their bandwidth on work that actually moves the needle.
mgb — Workflow to assign tickets (Hack4Work)
Grant Merrill
A solo submission focused on speeding up ticket assignment by routing assignees to the team members most likely to resolve the issue.
Out of the Box — Policy Parser Pro (Hack4Work)
Anas Shehata, Andrew Hauber, John Lott, Prashant Gupta, Scott MacLeod
Turns static policy documents into operational governance frameworks in ServiceNow GRC. Automatically generates policies, control objectives, controls, and risks in minutes instead of weeks of manual translation.
Quantum Coders — ReFood Tech (Hack4Good)
Anuja Ulhe, David Fulton, Suresh Loganathan, Vaishnavi Lathkar
A re-food application addressing the gap between food surplus and food need.
Ready and Waiting — Accessibility Enablement (Hack4Good)
Aaron Duncan, Craig Vollmar, Jackie Mondora, Matthew Erwin, Nickolys Hinton
A hub-and-spoke framework for capturing accessibility standards and evaluating the Now platform, vendors, and software against regulatory and best-practice requirements.
The Ottomators — BuildMyGame (Hack4Fun)
Ashish Kumar Mishra, Atul Grover, Ravi Gaurav, Saloni Bhatt, Sandeep Singh Rajput
A creative portal where kids type ideas into a text box and the platform turns their prompts into playable mini-games. Previously created games appear as tiles, so kids can revisit and learn from their past creations without ever touching code.
The Speed Bots — Zombie Control Tower (Hack4)
Claire Ashdown, Desiree Morehouse, Emma Mitchell, Uriah Brown, Wendy Murray
A high-visibility command hub for managing a collapsed society. Consolidates intelligence, coordinates emergency responses, manages resources, and disseminates critical information about safe zones and threats.
Works on My Instance — Hack4Dead (Hack4Fun)
Christopher Crockett, Daniel Macias, James McGaha, Suryakant Shoor
A zombie outbreak emergency response app covering six modules — evacuation zones, rescue dispatch, AI triage, supply chain, and quarantine tracking — with an Emergency Response Protocol Portal and an ops dashboard built in UI Builder.
More Photos from the event
