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.”Related:What AI's growing share of tech spending means for enterprises in 2027While 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 changeThis means that many enterprises seeking to succeed with AI are not just optimizing their workflows but also innovating and finding new ways of thinking about their business, Bradley Shimmin, an analyst at Futurum Group, told TechTarget. He added that the challenge is that many enterprises are unwilling to take bold steps to realize the success AI could deliver.Keep up with the story. Subscribe to the free TechTarget AI newsletter“The inertia that companies experience is very real,” Shimmin said. “Changing course is one of the hardest things a company can do. The course of companies looking at AI as a means of short-circuiting that is brilliant because AI itself can collapse the time from ideation to value realization.”Related:AWS goes inside the enterprise to find the real value of AIHowever, not every organization takes SharkNinja’s approach of shutting down the company for a whole week.“Every company has a different tolerance to failure, a tolerance to risk and a tolerance for opportunity the same way,” Shimmin said. “Some companies are willing to chase opportunities in the face of risk, and others are not.”Part of the challenge is that change is difficult, Val Henderson, CEO of Caylent, a cloud services and IT consulting company and an AWS partner, said in an interview.“The hardest part is getting over doing things the way you’ve always done them,” she said in an interview.Before organizations can significantly change, they need to work backward from how the business was originally envisioned, Henderson said.“What did you learn? What context do you have? And where do you need to make change incrementally? And that’s where you see the most success,” Henderson continued. “People who rush things and just want to get to the end state, I feel like that can make things much harder to make sticky.”The Celtics’ wayOne group that decided not to rush its AI transition is the Boston Celtics.While the 80-year-old pro basketball franchise built an internal AI chatbot grounded in the AWS Bedrock AI platform, the company is less focused on proving a point with its use of AI than on serving its goal of winning basketball games, according to CTO and vice president Jay Wessland.Related:AI Business to stop publishing“We go both directions on adopting new tools,” Wessland said in an interview. “We like to be innovative. We can be very nimble. We can jump to new technologies, new things very quickly, but we also don’t feel this need to always be on the latest and greatest or the bleeding edge.”He added that while the NBA team at times works hard to be at the forefront of analytics and technology, it recognizes that it is playing a human game by human beings.And that’s mostly not about technology.“It’s about getting the best players, and we use technology to help us do that,” Wessland said.“We go both directions on adopting new tools,” Wessland said in an interview. “We like to be innovative. We can be very nimble. We can jump to new technologies, new things very quickly, but we also don’t feel this need to always be on the latest and greatest or the bleeding edge.”He added that while the NBA team at times works hard to be at the forefront of analytics and technology, it recognizes that it is playing a human game by human beings.And that’s mostly not about technology.“It’s about getting the best players, and we use technology to help us do that,” Wessland continued.Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host and producer covering AI technology.About the AuthorNews Writer, AI BusinessEsther Shittu has covered AI technologies and industry trends since 2021. As co-host of the Targeting AI podcast, she talks with experts, thought leaders and practitioners exploring critical AI developments. Before AI Business, she wrote for SearchEnterpriseAI, the New York Daily News, Bklyner and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. When she's not diving deep into the world of AI, she spends her time on passion projects and raising her three daughters.