Paolo Testa
Head of Data & AI · Atlante
The company
Atlante installs and operates charging stations for electric vehicles. The chargers are fast and ultra-fast, so in the time it takes to drink a coffee, fifteen minutes or so, a car recovers enough charge to carry on. All the energy it delivers comes from renewable sources.
Today the network counts over 4,500 charging points online across five countries: Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland.
Leading data and AI is Paolo Testa, who works in the headquarters team, cutting across every country.
The challenge
At Atlante, AI adoption was already under way, with projects and training led by Paolo. What remained was bringing it more concretely into the daily work of the different teams.
“With AI there's little theory and a lot of practice. At some point you bang your head against it, but you have to do it.”
Every year Atlante brings the company together for the Atlante Days, two days to take stock of where electric mobility is heading. This year's theme was artificial intelligence, and leadership asked Paolo to bring it inside the company through a tailor-made initiative.
Paolo could have simply talked through the AI projects already built, presented what was new, demoed a few tools. But he wanted more: for one whole morning, everyone would get their hands on AI themselves. That's where the hackathon idea came from, and the choice of Yellow Tech to give that need the right format.
The solution
Yellow Tech turned that need into a vibe coding hackathon, the approach where software is created by talking to an AI, which writes the code.
The morning's challenge was to build an app designed to smooth the customer journey of someone charging an electric car. Yellow Tech split all of Atlante into ten teams, and within each team everyone had to contribute. The tool was Lovable, which generates the app from a description in Italian or English, with no need to write a single line of code.
For many it was their first time with a tool like this. People from every department, technical and not, realizing they could create a real app by speaking their own language. AI stopped being an abstract concept and took shape in front of them. The astonishment soon turned into competition, and the competition into fun.
Behind a day like that sits a lot of organization, from licences to activate to rules to explain, through to hundreds of people to coordinate across rooms. Yellow Tech ran it effectively from the start, bringing order to the early phases so that the morning would flow smoothly.
“Yellow Tech translated what I needed into the right format, and did the whole thing in an agile, flexible, fast way.”
The results
“I'll be honest: of all the initiatives I've seen, this was truly one of the most successful I've had the chance to witness.”
On the day of the hackathon the enthusiasm was obvious, from the nerds to the least technical. Many discovered for the first time that they could build an app by holding a conversation with an AI.
The change arrived the day after. AI project requests from the teams tripled, because people had seen first-hand what they can do with AI today.
Atlante's challenge now is governing that demand with an AI strategy, the kind of problem that appears when enthusiasm grows faster than the structure meant to hold it.
“It's money well spent, because you manage to pack so much into so little time.”
