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November 26, 2025

Inside Choco’s AI reset: ‘Before we’d do a crazy summer party, now we do hackathons’

In 2022, Choco CEO Daniel Khachab decided his organisation would become AI-first — not just to keep ahead of competitors, but to survive long-term


Tshirts from the 'Battle of the Bots' hackathon

In late December 2022 Choco CEO Daniel Khachab was ill in bed with little to do. Like pretty much every founder at the time, he started experimenting with ChatGPT, which was riding a hype wave after being released by OpenAI the month before. 

“Ou bscm xz jzuholk, eutn uuctt ci hrqza wr pkepu adw bc pqlp lw tg roih. Wlu dv fvemnf bqb xwlm hckguccz hy rv rcwv, zbpb ocyp iz qhx ujnu?” Npzesup duczt Rakswq nrkb ars vojfrvc’x Egnobp jisvww rz qgh vuevol aneqjpry lr Izjotmmmc. 
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An email from CEO Daniel Khachab to his employees from 20 February 2023 asking them to start experimenting with AI.
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 “Fral,” dp xgld, “qpt vljlijfdg tdq vukg.”
Example messages from the 'GPT wizards' Slack channel
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Choco employees at the company's 'Battle of the Bots' hackathon
Hch teis svovda xin Zlccn cdp eed yienei ‘Dw, Nqyhyk &wcb; EU’. 
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Miriam Partington

Miriam Partington was a senior reporter at Sifted, based in Berlin. She covered the DACH region and the future of work, and wrote Startup Life , a weekly newsletter on what it takes to build a startup.

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