What’s an Agentathon and Why Run One?
New word unlocked: Agentathon. What is it, and why should you partake in one?
Telefónica Tech regularly runs Agentathons in collaboration with Microsoft and directly for our customers. Let’s dive into why they are an effective way to improve AI value at your organisation and how you can get involved.
What is an Agentathon?
An Agentathon is a hands-on, collaborative event where your business professionals work with our technology experts to build AI agents using Microsoft’s Power Platform and Copilot Studio. These agents automate workflows, reduce manual tasks, and improve data accuracy.
Participants co-create solutions tailored to their organisation’s needs, often transforming existing spreadsheets, paper forms, or legacy systems into intelligent, automated processes.
In short, Agentathons help organisations:
- Empower your people to use AI, well
- Identify high-impact use cases
- Start using targeted AI agents
What’s the outcome?
Typically, teams leave an Agentathon with a Minimum Viable Agent (MVA): a working prototype of an AI agent that solves a real operational challenge in your organisation. You’ll learn about AI best practice for governance and scale; get hands-on experience with Microsoft tools; and, if participating in an open Agentathon, have the opportunity to network and share ideas with your peers.
Who is an Agentathon for?
Agentathons are primarily for business users to skill-up with agentic AI. However, they’re useful for IT teams too.
For the best results, we recommend a mixed group of both business and IT users, focusing on automating a business process that’s currently causing bottlenecks, unnecessary friction, is prone to errors, or consuming a lot of employees’ time.
- Business users: People who are close to everyday processes, who know the challenges and can bring real-world practicality.
- Citizen developers: People who are keen to innovate and build with low-code/no-code solutions.
- Solution architects: People who are skilled with the technologies and who understand your organisation’s IT structure.
What’s the format?
Telefónica Tech regularly delivers ‘open’ Agentathons in partnership with Microsoft, which bring together organisations in a particular industry. We also run ‘closed’ Agentathons with customers in a 1-1 setting.
In both scenarios, it’s a single day event with a mix of enablement presentations, demos, and hands-on workshops.
- Open Agentathon: Industry-focused and invite-only, bringing together several organisations.
- Closed Agentathon: One-to-one with your organisation, bringing together your teams.
Why should we partake?
An Agentathon is a great way to encourage and empower your staff to start benefitting from agentic AI.
Blockers to adopting AI agents tend to include low confidence, low skills, and unclear benefits. An Agentathon with Telefónica Tech overcomes these hurdles, helping you put people at the core of AI by focusing on vision, enablement, and results that impact your organisation’s productivity and growth.
What’s the difference between an Agentathon and a Hackathon?
The audience, purpose, format and outcomes are different in an Agentathon vs. a Hackathon.
Whereas Hackathons tend to be in-depth workshops held across a couple of days with a technology audience, Agentathons are single-day events to empower business users to get more value out of AI agents.
Which one is best for you depends on your aims.
Previous Agentathon participants say…
How do we get started?
Whether you’re interested in attending our next industry Agentathon or would like to schedule your own 1-1 event, please get in touch using the form below. A member of our team will reach out with more information to get the ball rolling.
We’re looking forward to helping you unlock the value of Microsoft Copilot!
