Jailbreak week: how SharkNinja is hacking its own business to unlock AI

This week, about a third of SharkNinja’s 4,600 employees will shut down their work computer environments to try to jailbreak some of the business problems the company faces and experiment with AI.

This is the second time that the global product design and technology company – known for its cordless and robotic vacuum cleaners - will hold a Jailbreak SharkNinja week.

The first one was earlier last spring, when all employees and management shut down regular operations for a week and attempted to experiment with AI to address business problems, said Velia Carboni, CIO at of SharkNinja, during a panel discussion at an AWS media event in Boston on Nov. 4.

“Jailbreak for us was the shock of everyone being able to participate in this new kind of change that we were going through,” Carboni said in response to a question from TechTarget about how the jailbreak week affected how the company uses AI.

“Sometimes it can feel like certain groups are going to move further ahead. It’s very natural for technology to be in the AI space, but it’s not always natural if you’re sitting in finance,” she continued. “What we really wanted to do is level the playing field, and we wanted people to jump into any problem.”

While the SharkNinja experiments are somewhat exotic, they speak to some of the changes enterprises have had to make to get their employees involved In. They are an example of a business redesigning its processes to gain value from AI, a process described in AWS’ recent Reimagining Turning AI into Value report.

“Everything we found comes down to one sentence,” said Tom Godden, an AWS executive in residence and one of the researchers in the report, during a presentation on the report’s findings. “The constraint moved from doing to deciding, and then the deciding started out among the people.”

The challenge of change

However, not every organization takes SharkNinja’s approach of shutting down the company for a whole week.

The Celtics’ way

And that’s mostly not about technology.