Westhomes Launches Its First “AI + Efficiency Pioneer Competition” to Encourage Digital Innovation

Practical Problem Solving Over Theoretical Concepts

The brief: find a task in your own department where an AI tool or a digital workflow makes a measurable difference, then build something other teams can pick up and use. A submission that describes a hypothetical improvement does not count. The company wants cases that already ran in a live workflow, with the results to show for it, and it wants the write-up clear enough that a department in another part of the business could repeat the work without calling the author. The point is not to build something impressive. It is to find the place where a person loses an hour a day to a task a tool could handle, and to fix that specific thing.

Four Structured Competition Stages

The competition runs in four stages: recruitment, training, case submission, and a final round of live presentations. Training comes from the Feishu project team and Westhomes’ own IT staff. The curriculum covers advanced Feishu Bitable features and the AI functions built into the platform, and participants apply what they learn to their own department’s problems rather than working through generic exercises. That is part of the reason case submission follows the training rather than running alongside it: by the time entries close, everyone has had the same starting material.

Live Presentations and Executive Recognition

Ten cases reach the final. Management judges the presentations in person, which puts the people who did the work in the same room as the people who decide where budget goes next year. Prizes are Gold, Silver, and Bronze, plus an award for technical execution. The Feishu team confirms which submitted cases qualify for a physical reward, and Westhomes has said it will consider additional incentives once it sees what the winning projects deliver in production, rather than committing to a bonus structure before any case has run.

Discovering Internal Digital Talent

There is also a talent angle. A competition of this kind makes it visible which employees already work this way, and which departments have someone who can carry a project from an idea to a working tool. Westhomes has said it wants to identify those people, and running the competition gives the company a way to do that without waiting for an annual review cycle. For the employees themselves, the draw is partly the training and partly a result they can point at later, which tends to matter more than a certificate.

Building a Scalable Knowledge Library

The other thing Westhomes gets is a library. Cases that run in one department and hold up under review become something the company can hand to another department facing a similar problem, which is cheaper than starting each improvement from scratch.

For a manufacturer of high-quality low-voltage electrical products, the testing part of any internal competition is what happens in the months after it ends. Ideas are easy to generate. Getting a department to keep using a new tool once the deadline passes is a different problem, and it is the one the company says it will measure itself against.