AI at Work Challenge: Explore the winning templates

We asked makers to build and submit templates showcasing their best examples of Coda AI in the workplace, and the results are in.

Katy Turner

Product Marketing Manager for AI at Coda

AI at Work Challenge: Explore the winning templates

By Katy Turner

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Blog > AI · 7 min read

How can AI help with my work?

 From June 13 to July 17, over 1,000 others investigated this question in our AI at Work Challenge, creating more than 150 templates that fit within one of the following categories: research & analysis, product development, marketing & selling, business operations, and personal productivity.

While each submission was thoughtful, creative, and impressive, we're thrilled to announce the winners today.

Shaping the vision of Coda AI: your work assistant

 When generative AI took off at the end of last year, like many others, we were intrigued and then excited by what it could do—like brainstorming or helping accomplish personal goals. We then started thinking about what AI could mean for work productivity and how an integration in Coda could play a large role.
What could an AI work assistant do?
In February, we shared our early vision, encouraging everyone to sign up for our alpha waitlist. As we rolled out access to alpha testers, we were thrilled to see Coda AI begin making a material impact on their work. For example, teachers started using Coda AI to generate student evaluations, startups began visualizing their early messaging, and enterprises improved their ability to summarize and incorporate product feedback across their org. By combining Coda AI with other Coda features—like tables that talk to each other and integrations with over 600 apps—it was clear that our vision was starting to materialize, and we were building something teams could use to generate value in the workplace.

The AI at Work Challenge

We were so encouraged that we decided to ship a Coda AI Beta, making our new AI work assistant (with its three initial features) available for all Coda workspaces. And on June 13, we also announced the AI at Work Challenge, empowering all makers to build and submit templates showcasing their best examples of Coda AI in the workplace, as determined by top judges:
  • Ben Relles: Founder at Good to Vote, former Head of Innovation at YouTube Originals.
  • Casey Winters: Former Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite and Partner at Reforge.
  • Reid Hoffman: Partner at Greylock, Co-founder and Board Member at Inflection AI, and former Executive Chairman and Co-Founder at Linkedin.
  • Shreyas Doshi: Former Product Leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo.
  • Tamar Yehoshua: Venture Partner at IVP and former Chief Product Officer at Slack.
  • Sarah Guo: Founder at Conviction, and Board Partner at Greylock.
  • Mamoon Hamid: Partner at Kleiner Perkins, and former Co-Founder and General Partner at Social Capital.
Our judges faced some tough decisions, and we're excited to share the winners in each category—as well as who took home the grand prize of $10,000.

Product development

 Scott Weir's Customer Sentiment Tracker
Scott's self-described “one-page wonder" emphasizes simplicity and value—making it easy to interpret customer feedback. Taking raw input from a mix of delighted and unhappy users, Scott leverages Coda AI to tag sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral and then summarizes trends and suggestions for improvement.

AI-generated ratings and sentiment tags.

AI-generated suggestions based on feedback.

This template can fit neatly into other Coda docs and can ensure decisions keep the most essential stakeholder in mind—your customer.

Research and analysis

 Gretchen Teagarden's 10-K Elves
Gretchen's template tackles an analysis of a daunting report: a 10-K filing. Often, these documents are 100-200 pages long, are packed with legal terminology, and have information scattered throughout or possibly hidden in footnotes. Using the Microsoft 10-K as an example, Gretchen used Coda AI to extract key themes, identify risk factors, and summarize trends. She also leverages other Coda features, like nested pages, tables, charts, and icons, to organize the information.

Using Coda AI to digest Microsoft's 10-K.

As a result, her example makes reviewing and absorbing key information about a 10-K filing much more efficient—as she estimates, in half the time and with 2x retention. Whether you are a full-time or casual investor, you can follow Gretchen's example to make informed decisions or apply her structure to other complex and lengthy reports.

Marketing and selling

 Mahmoud Harmouch's Aurora
As an avid user of AI-enabled tools, Mahmoud observed that there's a learning curve to writing productive prompts. Using his template, you can easily generate prompts that unlock a tool's full potential. You can also showcase the prompt or your work to others.

Creating a prompt to use in Midjourney.

Business operations

 Micah Lucero's Modern Recruitment
Micah's template is both a public job board and an applicant tracking system. Their idea came from working at a restaurant chain, where their team of two managed around 30 applications and eight interviews a day—while also doing operational work. So they needed a way to get up to speed on an applicant fast.

An applicant tracker, with AI-generated scoring.

Personal productivity

 Auryan Ratliff's Personal Trainer AI
As described by Auryan, their AI workout-building tool empowers office workers to prioritize their well-being by seamlessly incorporating exercise into their daily routines. Their template generates customized workout plans tailored to each individual's fitness level, preferences, and time constraints. With this template, employees can access a wide range of exercise routines, from desk stretches to full-body workouts, ensuring they stay physically active throughout the workday.

Choosing an exercise type and available equipment.

Reviewing the workout plan generated.

Grand prize winner

Paul Danyliuk's Storify & Carouselify
While the judges were impressed with so many templates, the grand prize is awarded to the submission that received the top score. And each each submission received multiple ratings based on the following:
  • Potential impact: How big an impact would this template make on your daily work? Would you use this template regularly? Would you recommend this template to a friend?
  • Creativity: How well does the template align with the theme of saving time and allowing you to do more at work? Does it offer a unique and creative solution to enhancing work productivity?
  • Template Design: How polished is the template’s design? How pleasant is the user experience? How easy is it for a new Coda user to get started with this template?
  • Caliber of Demonstration: How effectively do you demonstrate the problem you are trying to solve? How well do you demonstrate how the solution addresses the problem? Bonus points if you can demonstrate how this has already impacted you or your team.
In evaluating this winning template, the judges appreciated the mix of creativity, and the balance of personalization options within a polished design— ultimately allowing anyone to create ready-to-go social media content. Paul's entry explained that, like many others, he runs a business with its own unfilled social media account. He observed that an easy way to create engaging social content is to take existing long-form articles (such as blog posts or press releases) and turn them into bite-sized carousel slides and stories. With his template, you can generate informative, fun, and beautiful content to fill your own company's social media page. And it was easy for the judges to envision many others using this template regularly.

Bonus prizes winners

With this bonus prize, we encouraged participants to share their entries creatively across social channels and engage with different audiences. Since each doc was created with a pain point and its AI-enabled solution in mind, they ultimately resonated with many who discovered their stories.

Andy Farnsworth's AI Process Manager & Knowledge Base

Andy created an AI-enabled process and knowledge management tool based on two observations:
  • When creating a new system, it can be hard to start thinking in terms of process.
  • There's always a risk that knowledge will go stale or that you and others will have to spend time updating their processes to keep knowledge relevant. You should be spending some time thinking about and working with your processes from a second-order perspective—but not all of your time.
Andy created a doc that answers questions like:
  • Where do I start with a piece of work?
  • What task is next?
  • How do I do it?
  • How do I improve in my role?
Andy documented the doc creation process on his YouTube channel, so you could follow along, from idea to finalized submission.

Bill French's Promptology

As an early adopter of AI, Bill observed that writing successful prompts can be difficult for two reasons:
  1. Prompt construction: Most of us “wing" it when building prompts.
  2. Prompt repeatability: Most of us are inclined to build AI prompts from scratch every time.
He sought to overcome both obstacles with his submission, Promptology, whose value he describes as: The relevance of Promptology with the AI At Work Challenge parallels the need to scale AI productivity to build many things, not just solve a specific problem with AI. The Promptology Workbench is simply the “thing” that helps you build many other “things.” For this reason, it’s essential to think about the extended productivity this tool can produce.

Mahmoud’s LingAI: The All-In-One Writer's Productivity Toolkit

As a seasoned writer, Mahmoud wanted to use AI to help with content generation but found the output lacking a personal voice and creativity. As he describes:

LingAI is the ultimate tool for writers, designed to make them more productive and creative. It takes inspiration from the very best human writers and infuses it with the power of Coda AI to produce high-quality content that's unique and engaging. With LingAI, writers can forget about generic and lackluster content and focus on what really matters—their creative process.

Nathan Challan's Time to Coda

Nathan’s creation began with a question: "Where did my time go?" His answer: a tool that conveniently monitors your day's activities and, using Coda AI, tells you critical information like what tasks you should do more or less of and what to delegate or outsource. You can also use his template to journal and reflect, keeping your calendar and energy levels in check.

More examples of AI at work

Alongside these winners, over a hundred more Coda AI-enabled templates are available to help you and your team with your work in the Coda Gallery. Thank you to everyone who participated in the AI At Work Challenge, and congratulations to the winners!

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