The Needham consumer tech giant just dedicated an entire week to helping its 4,100+ employees figure out what artificial intelligence can actually do for them.
There’s a version of enterprise AI adoption that looks like a company-wide email, a new software subscription or two, and a lunch-and-learn that nobody asked for.
SharkNinja had other plans.
The Needham-based powerhouse behind Shark vacuums and Ninja kitchen appliances (chances are, they’re already in your home) recently unplugged from business as usual for an entire week. No project meetings, and no standard deadlines. In their place: Jailbreak LIVE, a four-day global hackathon that put all 4,100+ employees, across every function, every time zone, and every role, to work on one question: how do we actually use AI?
“The entire company kind of blocked out all business as usual,” said Grace Sperling, a Mechanical Engineering Manager in SharkNinja’s Ninja New Product Development Group. “This week is dedicated to teams being able to use this time to learn how best to use AI within our jobs and our daily life.”
The initiative ran at multiple scales simultaneously. On one end, roughly 20 large cross-functional teams tackled high-impact initiatives with the potential to reshape how the company operates at a strategic level. On the other, smaller groups and solo employees pursued their own self-directed projects, aimed at solving real, everyday challenges. Whatever you came in with, there was a lane for it.
Sperling’s team landed somewhere in the middle. Working across engineering and product development, they built an internal tool focused on something that sounds straightforward but gets complicated fast at a global company: documentation and communication across time zones.
SharkNinja’s teams operate around the clock — Massachusetts, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and China — and projects get handed off across a 24-hour cycle. When multiple people are picking up where someone else left off, making sure everyone is working from the same, current set of facts becomes a skill unto itself. Sperling described their AI hack as an attempt to make that handoff cleaner, smarter, and less prone to the kind of human error that creeps in when you’re three monitors deep in open documents.
“Making sure that everyone has the latest and greatest information so people can keep the ball rolling is really important,” she said. On a more personal level, Sperling came into the week with almost no AI experience — something she was quick to admit. She’s an engineer. Her world is physical. Hardware, tolerances, test kitchens. Not large language models.
“I didn’t even know how to open it up,” she said of the tools. That changed.
By mid-week, she and her team were uploading stacks of documents to Claude and letting it do the cross-referencing she’d previously handled with three monitors and her own two eyes. The relief wasn’t dramatic — it was practical. Less time scanning, fewer chances to miss something, more energy left over for the actual engineering decisions.
“I’m not looking at it as a replacement for hardware design,” she said. “It’s more of an aid — getting to the crux of the analysis I actually want, so I can go further and make hardware changes if needed.”
Elsewhere in the company, the Ninja Test Kitchen was working on something with a wider aperture: a global map of consumer food preferences, market by market, to inform both recipe development and product design. What people want to cook in Germany is not what people want to cook in America, and SharkNinja wants products that actually speak to both. AI, the thinking goes, might help them get there faster.
SharkNinja didn’t keep the energy to themselves, however. Through Jailbreak EDU, 35 students from 13 universities in the Boston area and beyond were dropped into the same pressure cooker. The students were organized into seven teams of five, handed real SharkNinja-inspired challenges across product development, quality, testing, and operational performance, and given under 48 hours to build something. No hand-holding, no hypotheticals. Just the same fast-paced, problem-solving environment the full-time team was already navigating. The message was implicit but hard to miss: AI fluency isn’t a specialty skill anymore. It’s the baseline.
“What is most exciting for me is seeing how people approach problems from all different sorts of backgrounds. There are people with graduate degrees and engineering managers and they all tackle problems differently than I would, and it’s fun to see them think!” said Jack Kovac a Sophomore at Harvard University, studying Mechanical Engineering.
The framing matters. SharkNinja didn’t run this week because AI is trendy. They ran it because ten years ago, a similar company-wide hack produced an entirely new business category. The precedent is baked in: when you give 4,100+ people focused time and permission to think without the usual constraints, things happen.
The week closed with a show-and-tell. Teams gathered, shared what they built, and, in many cases, showed each other tools they’d keep using the following Monday. For Sperling, that continuity was the point.
“Actually being able to focus and sit down and understand how the systems work, to be able to create a foundation so we can continue working on these projects as we resume business next week” she said, “…that’s what this week was really about.”
SharkNinja is a member of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MTLC).
To learn more about MTLC’s member community and upcoming programming, visit here.
