Yanolja, a global travel tech company led by Group CEO Sujin Lee, has successfully concluded “10X-THON: 2025,” its first enterprise-wide AI hackathon designed to accelerate AI transformation (AX) across the organization.

Held on November 6–7 at the Pangyo 10X Hall under the slogan “AI Everywhere – The Beginning of AX,” the event marked a major milestone in embedding AI into Yanolja's organizational culture and ways of working.

10X-THON is Yanolja Group's first integrated hackathon aimed at strengthening practical AI capabilities among employees and accelerating company-wide AX initiatives. More than 360 employees across 70 teams participated, representing Yanolja, NOL UNIVERSE, Sanha IT, and Dable, making it the largest internal hackathon ever held by the group. Participants presented innovative AI-driven ideas and solutions focused on real-world business and operational challenges.

Unlike traditional hackathons limited to engineering teams, 10X-THON brought together employees from development, product planning, marketing, and operations, forming cross-functional and cross-affiliate teams. Projects were developed across two tracks—Customer Experience Innovation (External Track) and Operational Efficiency (Internal Track)—with a focus on solutions that could be directly applied to services and internal workflows.

Official partners Amazon Web Services (AWS) and MegazoneCloud supported the event end to end, providing AI and cloud infrastructure, pre-event training programs, on-site mentoring, and access to generative AI tools such as Amazon Q Developer, Claude and Nova models via Amazon Bedrock, significantly enhancing project quality and execution.

During the opening session, Junyoung Lee, CTO of Yanolja Group, stated, “This event brought together employees from across our domestic affiliates as one true team, breaking down organizational and functional boundaries. Going forward, we will embed AI technologies into our culture and daily workflows to realize enterprise-wide AI transformation.”

A special guest session featured Benjamin Mann, co-founder of Anthropic, who joined Jongyun Kim, CEO of Yanolja Cloud, for a discussion on opportunities and risks in the AI era, responsible technology adoption, and collaboration models for vertical AI, sharing insights with participants.

The hackathon also introduced a three-stage AI-inclusive evaluation framework to enhance fairness and innovation. In the first stage, AI evaluators assessed originality and feasibility; in the second, internal and external customer panels validated ideas and prototypes; and in the final stage, Yanolja Group executives and external experts evaluated business potential, practicality, and scalability. As a result, 11 teams were selected as final award winners, with the grand prize awarded to Team UMO, whose project leveraged AI to reduce fragmentation in travel information and deliver tangible improvements to customer experience. Selected projects will be reviewed for potential commercialization and integration into Yanolja's actual business operations.

“10X-THON represents both a starting point for Yanolja's evolution into a technology-driven organization and a tangible example of true company-wide collaboration,” said Sujin Lee, Group CEO of Yanolja. “Building on this momentum, we will expand AI innovation across the entire Yanolja Group as part of our culture, redefining how work is done in the travel industry and further strengthening our leadership in global travel tech.”