Hackathon Success Story: How Two Students Used AI and OpenEdge to Tackle Real-World Business Challenges

Meet the Innovators: David and Alireza

Every great innovation starts with a spark, and for David, 31, and Alireza, 26, that spark was a shared passion for solving real-world problems with technology. Both students, with backgrounds in software engineering and a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI), joined the OpenEdge AI Hackathon that took center stage at the Leeds Digital Festival with a bold vision: to build systems that make a tangible difference in industries like healthcare, sales and manufacturing.

First Steps with Progress OpenEdge

For David and Alireza, the hackathon marked their first experience with Progress OpenEdge. “Truth be told, it was our first time using OpenEdge and its data,” they explained. “We worked heavily on it, analyzing and filling in missing values to train our AI model. The support from the OpenEdge team was incredible—it made this one of the best experiences of our lives.”

The OpenEdge Classroom Edition played a critical role in accelerating their onboarding. From a developer perspective, the availability of a ready-to-use environment eliminated common setup friction such as database configuration, schema bootstrapping and access management. This allowed the team to immediately focus on learning OpenEdge fundamentals, ABL concepts, database schemas and query patterns, while simultaneously using the data into their AI workflow.

Their project, Demand IQ, aimed to help sales managers optimize inventory by predicting product demand and balancing overstocks and stockouts. Using advanced data imputation techniques and time series transformers, they built a model capable of forecasting demand up to seven days ahead, with plans to extend this horizon to a full month.

Overcoming Challenges and Building Value

David and Alireza’s hackathon journey was a testament to creativity and determination. As first-time OpenEdge users, they quickly adapted to the platform, leveraging its capabilities to build their AI-powered solution. With guidance from the OpenEdge team, they engineered innovative approaches to data preparation and model training, making sure their project delivered actionable insights for businesses.

A Vision for the Future

David and Alireza’s journey didn’t end with the hackathon. They’re already working on new projects, developing novel ideas to improve model accuracy and extend prediction horizons.

At present, they are building the API layer of their AI service, designed to abstract model inference, data access and future agent-based workflows. The goal is to expose prediction and analytics capabilities via well-defined endpoints that can integrate cleanly with enterprise applications.

As a next architectural step, they are actively considering the adoption of Progress Agentic RAG. The motivation is to enable intelligent agents that can reason over both structured OpenEdge data and contextual enterprise knowledge, enabling advanced use cases such as dynamic querying, root-cause analysis and decision support.

The release of the OpenEdge MCP Server is a key enabler in this roadmap. Its ability to facilitate secure and efficient access to OpenEdge data significantly lowers the barrier for integrating Agentic RAG with existing OpenEdge-based systems, making it feasible to embed AI agents directly into enterprise workflows.

Reflecting on their experience, David said,

“I am absolutely eager to continue this project with OpenEdge. It’s really perfect for all students, even for all senior people or mid-level people.”

Alireza said, “In a world where everything is being integrated with AI, we want to leverage AI-centric frameworks to extend an organization’s predictive capabilities. Starting with OpenEdge-based systems is a powerful foundation, given their mature data models, enterprise reliability and seamless integration with modern AI workflows.”

Why This Matters

These hackathons are more than a competition—it’s a launchpad for innovation. David and Alireza’s story shows how curiosity, collaboration and a willingness to tackle tough challenges can lead to solutions that benefit entire industries. Their work is a testament to the power of combining AI with OpenEdge, and it’s just the beginning.

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