Seven working prototypes, built in a single day, will land on the industry's desk today as PI LIVE's BuildLab competition brings Tradedoubler, Awin, impact.com, Optimise, Everflow, Adtraction and Bravo Savings Network together to attack affiliate marketing's biggest unrecoverable cost: time lost to repetitive manual tasks, approval chasing and fragmented data.

The stakes are operational rather than financial, but they scale across every deal model. Whether an affiliate runs CPL, CPA, rev-share or hybrid terms, the hours burned on reconciliation and chasing approvals come straight out of the relationship-building, strategy and judgement work that actually moves EPC. The 2026 channel context — rising costs, tougher competition, complex consumer journeys and zero-click attribution pressure — makes that overhead harder to justify.

Who is building what?

Participants will work with AI tools, models and MCP integrations to produce solutions usable by brands, agencies, affiliates and creators. The output is designed to be freely available, not paywalled platform features — a point Tradedoubler's team stressed.

The seven squads:

• Ctrl Alt Elite (Tradedoubler): Corin Ward, Director of AI; Colin Chadwick; Daniel Frisk; Harry Collins; Dimitri Papatheodorou; Arne Luerßen, Head of Platform Engineering and Architecture.
• Here for A-win (Awin): Engineering Manager Sebastian Jonas leads six engineers, a product manager and a data engineer.
• PI Radius² (impact.com): Smita Pillai (RVP Customer Success, "The Fixer"), Alex Ratford ("The Promptmaster"), Otto Kokars ("The Data Brain"), Pini Stimler ("The Product Oracle") and Jakub Kozlowski ("The Connector").
• Unbound (Optimise): Lead Software Engineer Alejandro Rizzi plus four developers and a product owner.
• The Flow Fighters (Everflow): Arshi Bhasin, Dasha Shareyko, Ceno Pant, Laurie Cutts and Alina Goodine.
• The Adtraction Five: UK Country Manager Clare O'Reilly, Solution Architect Olga Tamm, Norway Country Manager Øivind Brunsell, Adtraction Labs head Oleg Mikheles and R&D head Daniel Ørsted.
• Innovation Lab (Bravo Savings Network): Paolo Puccini, Tommaso Ballerini and Jacopo Bonito.

What do the networks say they want out of it?

The Tradedoubler team framed its participation around AI acceleration. "AI is already changing how we work at Tradedoubler and how our clients do business, and the pace is only accelerating. We're taking part in BuildLab because we want to help shape what comes next for partner marketing," the team said, adding that the goal is "something practical that gives back to the community, freely available for everyone to use."

impact.com's squad called it "a different kind of challenge, one focused on solving pressing industry challenges at speed" and said it is looking forward to seeing "what we can produce in a day."

Optimise's Unbound team noted it has already been using AI to evolve its platform offering and wants to test what fresh ideas plus "a tight deadline" can deliver.

Adtraction CEO Simon Gustafson took a talent-development angle: "It's great to see people from across the industry come together and build something that everyone can benefit from." He added that the company's tech teams "don't often get the chance to take part in industry events like this," making BuildLab a rare spotlight for engineering staff.

These are vendor statements about intent, not measured results — no prototype has shipped, and none of the claimed efficiency gains can be verified before the day's output is reviewed.

How will the winner be picked?

An independent panel and a community vote will decide the winning build. The result will be announced on stage at PI LIVE Europe's AIP Summit at 1pm on 21 October. Progress updates are being posted on PI LIVE's social channels ahead of the reveal.

For affiliates and program managers, the open question after the reveal is adoption: whether free, community-built tooling can survive contact with real-world compliance workflows, program-terms variations and multi-network attribution setups. The 21 October announcement will show the prototypes; integration will take longer.