Think Bigger: Kevin Collins at the National AI Meet 2026

01.A day for Ireland's AI community

The National AI Meet is TechIreland's yearly gathering of Ireland's AI community, and the 2026 edition, the fourth, came to The Galmont Hotel in Galway on Thursday 24 September. Its theme was AI and Agents: Strategy, Processes and Roles. Niamh Smyth TD, Minister of State for Trade Promotion, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation, opened the day, and the speakers included Naoise Ó Cearúil TD, Chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Artificial Intelligence, Elise Landman of OpenAI and Catayoun Douglas of Google Cloud.

It was also the final of the National AI Challenge 2026, TechIreland's nationwide hackathon. The Challenge drew almost 1,000 registrations from across the island, close to double the 2025 figure, and the top 17 teams showcased their projects through the day ahead of the winners ceremony.

02.The talk: Think Bigger

Kevin Collins, founder of Echofold, opened with a slide that set out the point of the whole talk.

“Everything in this talk was built by one person with the right method and the right tools. None of it is out of your reach.”The opening slide of Think Bigger

Kevin was in Galway representing Manus AI, as a Manus Fellow. He wanted to use the time to show what's possible, he said, and to inspire people. He introduced himself as a Manus AI Fellow and a Claude Code Ambassador for Dublin, Ireland, running events for both, and as the founder of an AI-native company, Echofold, which runs training and consultancy. His background is 16 years in enterprise technology, specialising in cyber security.

The turning point, as he told it, was Manus AI in March 2025, which he described as the first tool to get agentic orchestration right. It changed how he worked: instead of asking AI for one task at a time, he could hold a whole workflow in his head and get a finished piece of work out at the end. The full talk is below.

Watch the talk · 11:11

03.From Launch in a Day to how to win a hackathon

The first event Kevin ran for Manus, in July 2025, was Launch in a Day: build as much of a whole startup as possible in four hours. Idea, brand, market, product, business model, go-to-market, prototype, website, financials and pitch deck, all in one afternoon.

“It was ambitious to put that into four hours, but it worked.”Kevin Collins

The second, in August 2025, ran ahead of that year's National AI Challenge: How to Win a Hackathon. It turned his method into four steps: research the problem, map the methodology, turn it into a plan, and prototype a demo. The twist, he admitted, was that he had never taken part in a hackathon himself, and his wife had told him he shouldn't be teaching it quite so confidently.

04.Three hackathons, three results

Then he took his own advice, three times.

winning teams at the National AI Challenge 2025, led by Kevin

1 of 3

to build a 16-agent network optimiser at AWS Breaking Barriers

2 days

of 13,000 applicants at Anthropic's Claude Code hackathon

Top 6

National AI Challenge 2025

A month after the workshop, Kevin led one of the three winning teams at the 2025 National AI Challenge, out of 44 projects. The team built a system to correct Leaving Cert exams: transformer-based handwriting recognition to read the scripts, and a multi-agent system to grade them. On stage he put the current process at around 4,000 teachers, 26 days and €53 million, and the team's system at two days and about €2 million. Marking delays, he pointed out, can cost students the right college place.

AWS Breaking Barriers

With telecoms engineer Stephen Dillon, Kevin then won the AWS Breaking Barriers hackathon. In two days they built a 16-agent system to optimise mobile networks at the provider level, using a dataset of a billion live mobile phone records, 6,000 cell towers in Cork and a digital twin of the network. Rolled out by a provider, he said, it could make networks 30 to 40 per cent more efficient.

It went further than a prize. Jan Hofmeyr of AWS brought the pair onto the main stage at FYUZ, one of the biggest telecoms events in the world, where they met the CTO of AT&T and senior figures from Accenture and AWS. Stephen has spent the year since building it into a company, ARANO, which is going into proofs of concept with major providers.

The Claude Code hackathon

In February 2026, 13,000 people applied to Anthropic's Claude Code hackathon and 500 took part. Kevin placed in the top six with an autonomous drone search and rescue system built in six days (five, he noted, as one went on the video): software to manage drone swarms and models trained to run on the drones, to find people lost at sea.

That led to an invitation to Claude Code's first birthday, where he presented to 500 people and met Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code. Since then the project has been given a €15,000 drone and is working with emergency services in Galway, with the aim of flying drones from the city's fire brigade building once approval comes through. Approval is the hard part and could take a couple of years, he said, but the plan is to turn it into a charity that saves lives.

05.Thirty minutes on stage

Over the past 14 months Kevin has run or helped run more than 25 events, and more than 2,000 people have come through the door. Some are about the questions AI raises: at the latest, a Claude Conversation evening, the room talked through the biggest threats AI poses, from jobs to families, ahead of a hackathon to work on them. Others, with Manus, focus on charities and AI for good. All of them are on the events page.

The hardest part, he said, is communicating the gap between what's possible and what most people do with AI. So at four recent events he has run the same segment: build the most complicated thing you can in 30 minutes.

• A health dashboard, in 30 minutes, pulling sleep and temperature from an Oura ring, more than 200 biomarkers, smart scales and blood test reports, and analysing his DNA locally, without sending it to an AI, to suggest personalised supplements.
• A playable Angry Birds clone, in 30 minutes, at the Claude x Supabase meetup.
• A flight simulator, in 10 minutes.
• A gig recommender, in five minutes, turning Spotify listening into suggestions for live shows.

“I just have the right methodology in my head, and I can give you one prompt to actually build anything at all in the world.”Kevin Collins

That method is written up step by step in How to Build a Real App From One Prompt With Claude Code.

Think Bigger, on stage at The Galmont. Photos: Paul Moore Photography for TechIreland.

06.What comes next

Kevin closed with two things he was about to launch. The first was his own harness for building software with agents, which he has since launched as Fractal Code, part of Fractal, now in private beta.

“I've basically 100% automated the full SDLC process. That's gone from plan to spitting out a full production-ready program at the end.” Kevin Collins, on what became Fractal Code

The second puts it to work: a one-week programme for five startups, where founders who arrive with nothing leave with a full production product and customers to sell it to. It is called 1WK, its first cohort runs in Dublin from 5 to 11 December 2026, and applications are open at 1wk.ai until 31 October.

“So, we're going to go and try and change the game.” Kevin Collins

07.Thanks, and the 2026 winners

Kevin finished by thanking TechIreland and Manus AI for taking a chance on him and letting him run events for them.

A big thank you to Manus for sponsoring this year's National AI Challenge and Meet, and for giving the participants the chance to build with Manus and benefit from it. TechIreland, in turn, thanked its lead partners Enterprise Ireland and the European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) Network; strategic partners Google Cloud, InsTech.ie, Manus and OpenAI; and supporting partners SIA Partners, Údarás na Gaeltachta, Technology Ireland ICT Skillnet, Skillnet Innovation Exchange and itag.

Thanks also to Eoghan Powell for filming the talk.

Congratulations to the winning teams of the TechIreland National AI Challenge 2026:

• Fabius, representing Dogpatch Labs
• Shannon ONE, representing Innovate Limerick
• Spheriio, representing WorkIQ
• Safe Waters, representing Irish Manufacturing Research, winner of the 2026 community vote

Kevin's upcoming events are on the events page, and anyone who would like him to speak at theirs can get in touch.

08.Frequently asked questions