Students Compete to Design the Perfect Campus Mate

Designing an "AI Buddy" to help Bocconi students navigate their day-to-day life on campus was the challenge at the heart of the hackathon held on 9 May at Bocconi, organized in collaboration with Yellow Tech and with the support of OpenAI. It was a full-day event dedicated to applied artificial intelligence, bringing together 120 participants to develop innovative solutions in support of the student community.

At the end of the competition, 16 overall winners were selected to take part in the final stage of the Italian Hackathon League in Turin. Among them, four students were awarded the top prize: Giulia Gatti, who ranked first, Renato Moscati, Alessandro Canonico and Jakub Przewoski.

AI at the Heart of Bocconi's Commitment

This initiative is part of Bocconi's broader commitment to artificial intelligence, an area in which the University is investing with growing attention across both teaching and experiential activities. The hackathon offers a concrete opportunity to apply skills while exploring the potential of AI technologies in real-world contexts.

"Bocconi promotes the conscious and responsible use of artificial intelligence, integrating it into academic programs and hands-on student experiences so that it becomes a practical tool for interpreting complexity and creating value in society," says Giovanni Salvucci, Director of Innovation, Transformation & Foresight at Bocconi University. "In times of rapid change, listening to students and giving them the freedom to create is a unique opportunity to challenge our assumptions and better understand the opportunities ahead."

"By working every day with companies to integrate artificial intelligence," adds Antonio Pisante, Bocconi alumnus, founder and CEO of Yellow Tech, "we see the significant impact AI tools can have on creativity, enabling people to focus on what they can create by delegating repetitive tasks to machines. It is extremely valuable for a university to foster the development of these skills among students. Bocconi has proven to be at the forefront of innovation in Italy, and for us it is both a pleasure and an honor to support this transformation."

The Competition with OpenAI Tools

The 120 students who took part in the hackathon were selected through the AI Games — an online challenge involving over 300 participants — as well as through student associations focused on artificial intelligence, ensuring the participation of highly motivated and well-prepared candidates. During the event, students attended a session by Carlotta Reviglio, Strategic AI Success Engineer at OpenAI, and then worked individually, alternating development phases with reviews and final presentations.

Through the University’s collaboration with OpenAI, participants were able to use advanced tools such as ChatGPT EDU, Codex and OpenAI APIs to build their projects, allowing them to generate code, develop functionalities and accelerate application prototyping. The solutions addressed four main areas: life in Milan (from accommodation to transport), international experiences, careers and the job market, and life on campus.

Submissions were evaluated based on three key criteria — interface, AI responsiveness and data quality — through a three-stage process: automated performance assessment, human evaluation of creativity and user experience, and a final pitch before the panel.

Student Perspectives

Giulia Galli, a second-year International Economics and Management student, ranked first overall at the end of the event. "It was a wonderful initiative," she says. "These are the best opportunities for students to put into practice what they have learned and explore their passions." Although AI was not the focus of her program — "At first I even wondered what I was doing there, since many participants had a background in artificial intelligence," she recalls — her passion for data enabled her to develop a simple, clear and highly effective model: "a Google-like tool for university life that I called BoccoBuddy."

Alessandro Canonico, in his first year of the Bachelor in Mathematical and Computing Sciences for Artificial Intelligence, also ranked among the four overall winners. "The assignment provided some initial data to design a relational chatbot that could support a hypothetical student. What made my model effective, however, was integrating it with additional external data." Alessandro is no stranger to this kind of competition, given his academic background, but he adds: "This experience was fantastic, also because we were able to access Codex, an opportunity that few hackathons can offer. Using this system allowed us to develop projects on our own that would normally require teams of four or five people."

Overall, the 9 May competition offered students a chance to test themselves on topics aligned with their interests using advanced tools, while also highlighting the growing role of AI in Bocconi’s educational experience — one that increasingly integrates technological skills into academic pathways and project-based learning.