MAKEathon 2025: Students Create Innovative AI Solutions for Real-World Business Challenges
On October 25 and 26, the FHNW Campus Olten became a hub for the innovative use of artificial intelligence. As part of the MAKEathon 2025, 60 students developed working prototypes to solve challenges from real companies.
At the closing awards ceremony, Dr. Rico Travella, Director of the FHNW School of Business, stressed the importance of placing human benefit at the centre of AI development – and of clearly communicating the added value AI solutions can deliver.
The MAKEathon 2025 proved exactly that: the participating students demonstrated not only technical expertise, but also a strong capacity to translate technology into tangible benefits for businesses and society.
A total of seven challenges showcased the broad potential of AI to create value in today’s economy.
The winning projects:
- Swissport – Team Porthub Royale built an intelligent real-time system to manage complex airport resources efficiently.
- Baloise Insurance – Team Trajecta designed a new customer experience integrating automation, chatbots and intelligent analytics.
«Hybrid AI, which combines methods of symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, is the foundation for developing intelligent and trustworthy systems.»
Further challenges:
- ECOFACT – Developed concepts for a banking system assessing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks.
- ISAAC / SUPSI – Proposed solutions for linking Building Information Modeling (BIM) with metadata and IoT for smarter property management.
- Metaphacts – Assigned two challenges to create AI agents for research tasks: one for information retrieval, the other for critical academic paper evaluation.
- Zoë Circular Building GmbH – Called for automated extraction and categorisation of data from PDF design plans to support architects and planners.