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This year’s CampIO showcased a strong collection of projects that use AI to make life easier, safer, and more productive for everyone.
Taking its theme from everyone’s favorite keyboard shortcut combination, CTRL-ALT, CampIO 2025 offered a series of presentations designed to make everyone’s lives easier, more productive, and more fun.
“When I first heard the ‘CTRL-ALT-Imagine’ theme, my mind went to how we could make even more powerful shortcuts,” said CampIO emcee and NetSuite Architect Angela Brazil. “I envisioned a shortcut that could take anything we can imagine and make it a reality.”
This year’s presenters rose to Brazil’s challenge. Most of them incorporated AI, with heavy emphasis on finding ways to make life better for themselves, their colleagues, and their communities.
“As I’ve thought more about how AI can connect with other tools and processes, I find myself relying on it more and more as an accelerator,” Brazil said. “AI isn’t a magic wand. It’s a technical toolset.”
Presenters shared their innovations throughout the week leading up to Centric Consulting’s annual September meeting. Brazil and the other organizers devoted one day to the top three projects of the Centric’s India team’s CampIO competition, while a vote at the end of the week determined the top three U.S. projects.
Keep reading to explore the top three U.S. and Centric India CampIO projects of 2025.
The CampIO Winners’ Circle
First Place: Focally Local: Leveraging AI to Build a Local Business Directory
Presenters: Senior Architect Jeff Aalto and Mohit Rawat
Aalto and Rawat’s first-place project, Focally Local, combines their love of local businesses with their passion for innovative AI solutions.
“I have a soft spot in my heart for trying to shop as much as I can at a local business, especially for the tiny places like egg stands, honey stands, coffee roasters, and breweries,” Aalto explained. “However, a lot of them don’t even have websites or phones. We wanted to create an app that would make it easier for them to attract customers and build their businesses.”
The Focally Local app allows users to submit images or voice queries about the types of goods or services they’re looking for. The app uses Azure Speech Services and LLMs to process and categorize data, including parsing details such as product lists from photos.
“We used an AI-powered multi-agent interface that used retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and multiple other AI tools to let users find venues and products nearby,” Aalto explained. “The solution was based on Python and SQL on the back end with C# for the Android-based mobile app front end.”
“Our goal was to do it for low cost, and we were able to use some Azure credits we had, and it turned out pretty well,” added Rawat. “Neither of us is an application development person, so the majority of this technology was brand new to both of us. We learned a lot and found a way to use technology to bridge gaps in visibility and access, and that’s the whole point of CampIO!”
Second Place: AI Meets Unmatched User Experiences: A Lesson from the Big Bang Theory
Presenter: Supply Chain Lead Rob Williams
Williams’ project explored how AI can help consultants deliver Unmatched Experiences (UMX) for clients by developing their emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) to complement their already high IQs.
“I wanted to find a practical use of Microsoft Copilot to bridge the gap between technical expertise and interpersonal effectiveness,” Williams said. “That is a crucial skill for consultants working with diverse clients.”
However, he started with a twist: Williams grounded his demonstration around characters from The Big Bang Theory.
Using Copilot, Williams evaluated the EQs of the hyper-intelligent but socially awkward Sheldon and the emotionally perceptive Penny. His analysis proved that Sheldon lacked the skill set to perform well in social situations, while Penny ranked high on EQ but average on IQ.
“The ideal would be to balance the EQ and IQ sides, but like Sheldon, tech-minded consultants don’t always have those skills readily available to them,” he said.
That fact set Williams up for the heart of his demonstration: showing how Copilot can produce client communications that reflect higher EQ to drive more productive relationships.
Williams used Copilot to quickly transform technical summaries into engaging, client-friendly messages. He even tailored communications for different audiences, including executives or project teams.
“Copilot’s iterative feedback allows consultants to refine their messaging, making it more empathetic and accessible without sacrificing technical accuracy,” he said.
“This approach not only saves time but also helps consultants build trust and rapport with clients, ultimately leading to more successful engagements.”
Third Place: A Wi-Fi-Enabled Cybersecurity Team Electronic Conference Badge
Presenter: Cybersecurity Engineer Jack Hance
For his project, Hance drew on his deep experience with hacker culture and his passion for personal craftsmanship to create electronic badges that identified his colleagues at Centric’s September meeting.
“These types of badges are a part of hacker culture and are common at cybersecurity conferences, such as DEFCON,” Hance explained. “They are a strong form of artistic and creative expression in a heavily technical field.”
Hance’s badge featured a 7-by-7 grid of RGB LEDs that play custom animations. He designed 11 animations and programmed them all onto each badge. However, it’s when team members get together that the magic begins.
“They are Wi-Fi enabled, so each badge will autonomously sync its animations with the animations of other badges nearby,” Hance explained. “Each badge transmits its current animation and listens for transmissions of nearby badges. If the transmission of a nearby badge has a MAC address higher than its own, it will change to that badge’s animation.”
Hance described the challenges he faced during the project, including applying a “conformal coating to the badges for safety” and fixing a design error that he didn’t discover until after he had placed the final manufacturing order.
“This has been my life for about the past few months or so,” Hance told the audience, noting that he had spent about nine hours on the final, manual assembly that the factory couldn’t perform.
“My message is that if you’ve ever been interested in building any type of hardware project, it’s never been easier,” Hance said. “With so many open-source tools and free tutorials online, anyone can dive in and build cool things.”
CampIO India 2025 Presentations
“To me, CampIO India is very special, because it does not just showcase clever hacks or elegant code,” said CampIO India’s moderator and Centric India Senior Manager Arindam Pal. “Instead, it brings forward new ideas based on real-world challenges.”
Pal noted that the top three projects address major issues affecting the world today: healthcare, drought, and trust and integrity in hiring, when the competition for talent has never been greater.
Below are the top three projects from CampIO India.
First Place: Restoring Trust in Hiring with AI Interview Guardian Fair Sight
Presenters: Navi Singla, Anshuman Joshi and Saurabh Kumar
The winning entry for CampIO India, AI Interview Guardian, restores trust in hiring by detecting deepfakes, lip-syncing, hidden coaching, and bias in video job interviews.
“Fair Sight addresses a very real problem we all face in today’s remote work environment,” Niva explained. “We want to transform the virtual hiring process from just a ‘gut-feel’ session to a model that is AI-driven, more data-informed, and more impactful.”
The solution uses a combination of Python, OpenCV, and LLMs to identify deep fake interviews and generate real-time reports and behavioral analytics. It does so by looking for cues such as a candidate whose eyes dart frequently to the side or by detecting tiny discrepancies between a speaker’s lips and the words they are “saying.”
For example, she described candidates whose eyes would keep drifting to the same spot after a question, and then they would come up with a perfect answer.
“Later, we realized the candidate was likely reading from a second screen or getting help,” he said. “Candidates have many ways to game the system, and interviewers can unintentionally introduce bias. Either way, the trust needed to make the best hire is compromised. Our tool can solve that problem.”
The solution is non-intrusive and can run alongside regular interviews, providing a trust layer for virtual hiring. By building the tool, the team learned about real-time analytics, the value of combining multiple AI models for robust detection, and the need for customizable use cases.
“AI may fool the screen, but smarter AI can keep it clean,” Niva said. “It’s not just a tool — it’s a trust layer for virtual hiring.”
First Runner Up: Smart IoT Irrigation
Presenters: Puja Kathuria, Amrita Maity and Mohit Rawat
Team IoT Growers members Kathuria, Maity, and Rawat combined forces to build a houseplant watering solution that could scale to solve another life-threatening problem: global water scarcities.
Using a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller, capacitive soil moisture sensors, and Azure cloud integration, the solution remotely monitors soil moisture, generates alerts for manual watering, and automatically waters houseplants to achieve the correct level of moisture. The team also used Power BI to build a real-time dashboard to monitor the process.
“We came together for this idea because often apartment dwellers and plant enthusiasts forget to water balcony or indoor plants, especially during travel or busy days,” Kathruia said.
The team’s future plans include using data for machine learning models that predict water usage and recommend crop choices, making smart farming accessible and sustainable for all.
“Beyond our homes, inefficient water use and climate stress are depleting fresh-water resources, causing global scarcities,” Kathruia continued. “Complex, large-scale smart irrigations exist, but we believe our solution would be less expensive and less complex, even on a larger scale.”
Second Runner Up: Helping Patients Remember Their Prescribed Medications with ‘MyMedsMate’
Presenters: Sonam Kaur, Shilpi Hars Rachit Goyal and Rajalaxmi Thillainatarajan
Team CareSync tackled the challenge of medication non-adherence, which causes significant health risks and preventable deaths each year. Their solution, MyMedsMate, combines an IoT-enabled smart pillbox with a mobile app powered by AI analytics.
“In the U.S. alone, about half of all patients do not take their medications consistently, costing about 125,000 lives a year,” Kaur said.
To address this problem, the team built an IoT-enabled smart pillbox and mobile app, powered by AI analytics. The pillbox uses weight and motion sensors to detect when a patient has taken their pills, while optical character recognition (OCR) digitizes prescriptions for seamless tracking. Future plans include multi-user support and telehealth integration.
“Our system is a human-centered approach that goes a step further than traditional pillboxes or reminder apps in the U.S. market by confirming that the patient has taken their pills and escalating the problem only when the real risk patterns emerge,” Kaur said. “Our goal is to reduce worry, bring clarity, and help patients stay consistent.”
But Wait, That’s Not All: Even More CampIO Presentations
AI-Powered, No-Code Testing with AccelQ: Architect Daniel Vogel introduced AccelQ, a cloud-based, AI-powered, no-code test automation platform that empowers users to automate software testing without writing code.
From Prompt to Production: Ship Real Features with GenUI. Consultant Chris Levine presented on Generative UI (GenUI), demonstrating how LLMs can build front-end user interfaces using only prompts, images, or design specifications.
Annual ReviewR: Event-Driven Distributed System with .NET Aspire and Ollamas: Modern Software Delivery Service Offering Lead Matt Miller, Architect Jonathan Flatt, and Architect Ted McKenna described how they used .NET Aspire and Ollama, a local LLM, to build a better annual employee review app, Annual ReviewerR.
Low-Code AI Agents for Business Automation: Senior Architect Jason Smith demonstrated how low-code/no-code platforms, such as N8N and Voiceflow, are revolutionizing the creation of AI agents for business automation and other practical applications.
AI-Powered Prompt Engineering for Salesforce Business Analysis: Salesforce Experience Cloud Lead Jennifer Elliott and Salesforce Senior Consultant Teresa Bennett Elliott shared their journey to develop reusable, copy-and-paste AI prompts for Salesforce business analysis and project documentation.
Celebrating Creativity and Innovation
This year was our 16th CampIO event, and as usual, CampIO 2025 was more than a showcase of technical prowess. Instead, it celebrated creative problem-solving, teamwork, and the joy of discovery.
Whether building AI-powered agents, designing more innovative business processes, or tackling real-world challenges in consulting, healthcare, or agriculture, participants embraced the spirit of CTRL-ALT-Imagine by reimagining shortcuts to productivity and unmatched experiences.
The combination of AI, low-code platforms, and a healthy dose on display at CampIO 2025 empowered consultants and to turn their imaginations into valuable solutions for themselves, their clients, and everyone around them.
