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Zuora recently hosted Prompt-A-Thon 2025: The 10x Catalyst, an event that demonstrated the transformative power of Generative AI.

Held across our Chennai and Bengaluru offices, the Prompt-A-Thon brought together over 190 participants from not just Zuora but also organizations such as Amazon, PayPal, Cisco, and Goldman Sachs — all focused on solving real problems using AI, on a Saturday.

The sessions

The keynote from Zuora’s Prasy Velagareddi (Product VP), Shanthi Sridhar (Engineering Director), and Anirudh Ravichandran (Data Science Director) spoke to Zuora’s AI-driven 10x journey. Next, an AI Masterclass by Gopi Krishna Lakkepuram (Founder & CEO of Hyperleap AI) and Amit Sharma (VP AI & ML, Flexera) focused on effective AI prompting for ideation and innovation, and introduced the C.L.E.A.R. framework — Concise, Logical, Explicit, Adaptive, Reflective — an effective way to write useful prompts.

A third session, delivered by Zuora’s Summet Kumar (Director, Global Services) and Prasy Velagareddi, introduced the five real-world business cases to pick from:

• Monetization Woes
• Forecasting Usage Revenue
• Silent Churn
• Global Expansion
• Growth Plateaus

Then we put up some prize money to keep everyone focused, put out more coffee and snacks, and set a timer to start the innovation.

The winners

With over 180 submissions, the judges used the evaluation criteria of Problem Insight and Relevance, Business Feasibility, User Experience Thinking, 10x Potential & Innovation, and Clarity & Communication to select three projects for the prize money:

• ChurnGuard AI — Winner, C Greeshma from SignDesk. A behavioral early-warning system to detect silent churn 60–90 days before cancellation. Rather than asking “Will this customer cancel?”, ChurnGuard AI asks “What specific behaviors indicate this customer is pulling away, and what intervention has the highest probability of success?” — generating AI-personalized intervention strategies and natural-language explanations of churn risk drawn from Zuora’s rich billing and usage data.
• RevStream: The Usage Revenue Intelligence Revolution — Runner-Up, Kayalvizhi Karthikeyan and her AI Cross-Functional Super Team from PayPal. Research indicated nearly 50% of usage customers churned because their usage bills were mysteries. RevStream leverages predictive intelligence, real-time bill predictions, and behavioral optimization from actual usage patterns to deliver 90%+ revenue forecasting accuracy.
• GenAI-Powered Silent Churn Prevention — Runner-Up, Rajeshkumar Arumugam from Ideas2IT Technologies. Detects early disengagement signals to generate highly personalized, contextually relevant intervention strategies using an LLM — a self-learning retention engine to drastically improve customer lifetime value.

Our Prompt-A-Thon underscored Zuora’s strategic commitment to embedding AI and LLMs deeply into our product offerings in a safe and secure manner.