BoothHacks 2025: The Future of AI Through Entrepreneurial Imagination

In its inaugural year, BoothHacks brought together 132 student builders, 37 new AI-powered products, and 10 judges for a high-Intensity, high-creativity 48-hour event that showcased the future of applied artificial intelligence at Chicago Booth.

Student organizers, Archita Mishra, Fahad Jamal, Kriti Ganotra, and Sana Ajani, launched BoothHacks with a clear vision for what didn’t yet exist at Booth: hands-on creation. They explained, “We saw a gap in real creation and iteration, especially for career switchers who had limited technical product experience.” BoothHacks was created to close that exact gap and give people hands-on exposure to building with new technology.

This year’s prizes, sponsored by Booth centers and student groups across venture capital, AI, tech, and impact, reflected the breadth of innovation across the competition. In total, the competition awarded eight different prizes, spanning categories from sustainability to data-driven design. The top prize was awarded to Eden: Agentic AI Platform for Net-Zero Single Family Homes for Best Overall Product. 

The Best Use of AI was awarded to Choreo, a project closely aligned with themes central to Booth’s Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence (CAAI). Student organizers noted the innovation that emerged, “The creativity and the range of ideas genuinely surprised us. Teams built solutions around digital twins, health and wellness, elder care, architecture, and more. People used the tools to create powerful, well-thought-out solutions to real problems.” 

Innovation at the Intersection of AI, Markets, and Human Behavior

Across the 37 projects submitted, students gravitated towards persistent structural problems in markets:

•   Attention misallocation
•  Information frictions
•   Decision bottlenecks

Judge Dr. Brian Jabarian, Howard and Nancy Marks Fellow and Roman Family Center for Decision Research Principal Researcher, emphasized, “The most compelling products weren’t built around the question ‘How do we add AI to this?’ but instead, ‘Where does the world misallocate attention, trust, or effort – and how do we fix it?’” 

Many teams emphasized AI’s ability to automate judgment, integrate multimodal data, and create capabilities that simply didn’t exist in traditional product categories. The result: prototypes that operated not as novelties, but as functional systems designed to solve real human problems.

Best Use of AI Winner Spotlight: Chores

Team Participants: Sidhant Aggarwal, Ludmilla Lomba, Netra Murthy, and Rahul Shukla

Choreo is an AI-powered platform designed to manage the routines that shape daily life through a single prompt, compiling that prompt into a smart agent that executes the entire workflow automatically. These agents book rides based on traffic, schedule appointments, manage budgets, and maintain transparent failure logs to ensure accountability.

Choreo’s standout “Caregiver Mode” was inspired by real families managing the needs of aging parents and loved ones. As Sidhant Aggarwal shared, “We observed that everyday users had no real way to turn plain language into dependable actions. […] people should be able to describe how they want life to run and have a system quietly carry that out.” Rahul Shukla added,  “The real innovation wasn’t technical power, but simplicity, accessibility, and trust.” And technically, the pace was even faster than expected. As Netra Murthy shared, “I was amazed at how quickly Lovable allowed us to turn an idea into a real, working prototype. In just a few clicks, we went from concept to live demo.”

Judge Dr. Jabarian praised Choreo as, “A credible solution under extreme time pressure – exactly how breakthrough startups are born. If they keep iterating with real users, this could easily grow into something operational.” 

Choreo’s multimodal, cross-device orchestration of AI under intense time pressure throughout this process is precisely the type of execution Booth hopes to cultivate in future participants.

Why BoothHacks Matters for Booth and for the Future of AI

Hackathons foster a learning environment no classroom can fully replicate. Students navigate behavioral constraints, incentive design, technical architecture, and user needs simultaneously and under extreme time pressure.

Student organizers noted the scale of enthusiasm for this kind of event at Booth: “This experience taught us that the appetite to build is massive. We could not even accommodate everyone who wanted to participate. There is clear demand for bigger and better BoothHacks in the future!”

To remove technical barriers, BoothHacks student organizers partnered with Loveable. They explained the decision, stating, “Traditional hackathons usually require technical experience and the ability to build an MVP and tech stack from scratch. By using Lovable, we shifted the focus to product iteration, user research, and user experience. Coding was no longer a barrier because AI handled the heavy lifting.”

BoothHacks also strengthened Booth’s ecosystem by connecting venture capitalists, researchers, industry professionals, and students throughout the event’s timeline to accelerate ideas and cultivate a community of builders and thinkers.

Looking ahead, student organizers and judges hope to see BoothHacks evolve into a year-round pipeline for experiential learning, product development, and venture creation. Student organizers emphasized, “We hope (BoothHacks) shows people that they do not need to wait to start building. They can take an idea and turn it into something tangible right away. We also hope it sparks more collaboration across the community.” “The energy from every group involved (founders, judges, sponsors, and participants) made it work. […] The momentum fed on itself!”

Looking Forward: Making BoothHacks 2026 Even Stronger

This year’s success sets the foundation for even larger-scale future events. Student organizers shared, “Next year, we would introduce deeper AI integrations across different formats. Teams could work with multimodal agents that combine speech, vision, and action, build tools that automate real workflows, or experiment with synthetic user testing powered by AI personas. The goal would be to expand the range of problems people can solve with AI.” 

The 2025 BoothHacks Project Gallery is available for viewing, and showcases the innovative products developed by participating students. 

These projects reflect a growing culture of innovation at Booth, one where students move beyond analyzing markets to actively shaping them through technology. BoothHacks 2025 demonstrated what is possible as the community looks forward to future iterations of the event. The momentum this year serves as a foundation for continued experimentation, collaboration, and creation.

Thank you for your continued support.

As this event grows, so will opportunities to invest and champion future BoothHacks teams building the next generation of AI-powered products.