1The Challenge
What was the challenge?
Mercer's Gurgaon office sits at the intersection of human potential and organisational strategy — their people think in systems and think about the future for a living. The ask was ambitious: design a full-day AI team activity that was one part creative, one part outcome-driven, with a brief that went well beyond a single memorable day. Every participant needed to leave with a genuine new capability — the ability to use AI as a real tool in their everyday working lives, not just a novelty they'd encountered once at an event.
The challenge was designing an AI team building experience that could hold both registers simultaneously: light enough to generate real creative energy, rigorous enough to produce real solutions. And doing it across 7 teams drawn from 4 different functions, each bringing different perspectives, different pain points, and very different relationships with technology.
2Our Solution
What solution did we design?
The Thought Bulb designed a two-act, full-day AI team activity — AI Comic Strip followed by AI Hackathon — with the creative act serving as a deliberate warm-up that unlocked the imagination the hackathon would then put to work.
Act 1 — AI Comic Strip: Teams were given a deceptively open brief: use AI generation tools to create a comic strip about their office daily life and imagine what Mercer looks like in the future. The results were extraordinary — seven teams produced rich, visually striking comic narratives about Mercer's world, its challenges, and the future they were building toward. Mercerman, The Mercer Marvels, The Rise of AI-Man, Captain Mercer — each team conjured their own vision, their own heroes, and their own version of what AI means for the organisation they work in every day. As an AI team building activity, the comic strip did what the best creative prompts do: it revealed what people actually think and feel, in a format that made it safe and exciting to say so.
Act 2 — AI Hackathon (Three Phases): The hackathon took everything the comic strip had surfaced and turned it into structured problem-solving. Phase 1 — The Problem: teams identified the real, day-to-day pain points they face at work. Phase 2 — The Solution: teams designed AI-powered solutions to the problems they had identified. Phase 3 — Build & Pitch: teams used AI tools — including Mercer's own internal platforms — to build a working webpage demonstrating their solution, then pitched Shark Tank-style to a panel of judges.
3How We Did It
How was the programme delivered?
The day began with the AI Comic Strip — a high-energy AI team activity that required no prior AI expertise but rewarded curiosity and imagination. Teams used AI generation tools to bring their comic visions to life, and the output across all 7 teams was genuinely impressive: fully realised narratives with custom characters, visual storytelling, and a depth of thinking about Mercer's future that no conventional ideation session would have produced.
By the time the AI Hackathon began, the room was already warm, already thinking creatively, and already comfortable with AI as a medium. The three hackathon phases then applied that comfort to real problems — moving from diagnosis to design to delivery in a single day.
The Shark Tank format for the final pitches gave the hackathon genuine stakes. Teams weren't just sharing ideas — they were defending them, responding to questions, and competing for the recognition of being among the top 3. The judges evaluated with the rigour of investors looking for real solutions, not just interesting concepts. The 3 winning ideas that emerged were real, AI-assisted solutions to real problems, built and demonstrated by the people who understood those problems best.
4Key Outcomes
What were the results?
The Mercer AI programme delivered something genuinely rare in the AI team activities space: an experience where the output was both a shared memory and a transferable skill. Every participant left having used AI tools to create, solve, and build — not as a novelty, but as a genuine capability they could carry into their working lives.
The AI Comic Strip outputs were extraordinary in their own right — seven unique visions of Mercer's future, created by the people who work there every day, rendered with AI tools most of them had never used before. As artefacts of what the organisation believes and aspires to, they were as revealing as any strategy session.
The AI Hackathon took it further. Three ideas, selected by a panel of judges, built on AI tools, and pitched with conviction — each one a solution to a problem that had been sitting unaddressed until someone was given the time, the tools, and the permission to solve it.
50 participants. 7 teams. 3 winning ideas. One day that changed how an entire team thinks about what they can do with AI.