From Demos to Disruption: AI Projects That Stole The Show At Sigma’s 2025 Hackathon

Hackathons aren’t about cool demos. They’re about breaking the cycle of “good enough” and proving what’s possible when you throw out the old playbook. In just three days, our teams turned migration headaches into one-click apps, cut incident response from hours to minutes, and made searching giant workbooks as simple as asking a question. 

Here are the projects that show what’s next:

First place: App Builder Plugin

Picture this: You've spent months perfecting dashboards in your old system. Beautiful charts, complex filters, custom layouts — all representing countless hours of your work. Then comes migration day, and you're staring at a blank canvas, wondering how to recreate everything from scratch.

Our winning team said enough of that and built an AI-powered App Builder Plugin that analyzes your existing dashboards or applications and automatically generates Sigma data apps from them. No more starting over. No more recreating what you've already built perfectly once.

The project came together with pure hackathon energy. The team started with different ideas but quickly rallied around the migration challenge after our sales team confirmed it was the most common pain point. They split into specialized roles — some building a Chrome extension to capture screenshots and analyze dashboards, others training the AI and constructing the app-building flow on Sigma. With clever prompt engineering and last-minute problem-solving, they delivered a game-changer.

The result? A proof of concept that shows how AI can make moving to Sigma faster, simpler, and seamless. Because you shouldn't have to rebuild what you've already perfected.

Second place: FirefighterGPT

Noisy alerts kill focus. FirefighterGPT puts an end to that.

This AI-powered first responder pulls in Sentry events, Kubernetes logs, and trace data from Sigma tables, then maps everything back to your codebase with Auggie (the Augment CLI). Instead of flooding Slack with noise, FirefighterGPT posts concise findings: evidence, quick fixes, long-term recommendations — even ready-to-merge hotfix pull requests.

By cutting through the noise and surfacing real solutions immediately, FirefighterGPT slashes your mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and resolve (MTTR). What used to take hours of digging through logs — alert archaeology — now resolves in minutes.

Third place: MCP Server with Unified Search

We’ve all been there: hunting through endless tabs and charts in a massive workbook, knowing the answer exists but not where to look. It’s like searching for a needle in an ever-growing haystack, and frankly, you have better things to do.

The MCP Server with Unified Search embeds an AI assistant directly into Claude Desktop. Using semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), it understands your question, surfaces the right data instantly, and points you to the exact workbook element you need.

If the answer doesn’t exist yet, it identifies the best source and triggers Ask Sigma to generate a new workbook automatically. No more hunting. No more guessing.

Behind the scenes, the design is elegant: LLMs handle writes, a vector database handles reads — delivering speed and accuracy in one flow. The result shows how AI can make analytics exploration smoother, smarter, and more intuitive — the way it should have been all along.

Beyond the winners

Three days. Dozens of ideas. Solutions that will reshape how thousands of teams work with data. Hackathon 2025 proved that the biggest breakthroughs come from tackling the problems everyone accepts as the status quo. Our teams didn't just build cool demos — they built the foundation for a world where migration is seamless, incidents resolve themselves, and finding answers is effortless. That's the future we're building at Sigma, one hackathon at a time.

Disclaimer: The projects featured in this article were created during Sigma’s 2025 Hackathon. They are experimental explorations and proofs of concept—not production features. There is no guarantee these projects will become part of the Sigma platform, but they highlight the creativity and innovation of our teams.