World Cup Season at Gradion Comes With Its Own Apps

The FIFA World Cup 2026 is underway. At Gradion, two team members decided not just to watch, they built.

Uyen Nguyen, from the Community team in Vietnam, shipped an internal voting app that lets Gradioners across Vietnam, Egypt, and Germany predict match results and track scores against each other. She built it with Claude. No engineering background. No formal project brief. Just an idea and a deadline she gave herself.

Joschua Ziethen took it a step further. He added a web comparison tool that runs the same match prediction across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, side by side, to see which model actually knows football. Early results: Claude is ahead.

At Gradion, AI-first is not a policy. It is a habit. Engineers use it to move faster. Consultants use it to think sharper. And apparently, the Community team uses it to settle football arguments before kickoff.

But what the World Cup apps revealed is something beyond tooling. A voting app is, at its core, a reason to talk to each other. Uyen did not build a prediction engine, she built a shared ritual. Every match becomes a small moment of connection: a bad pick to laugh about, a right call to defend, a leaderboard that keeps refreshing across three time zones.

Hanoi is checking the scores. Cairo has opinions about the quarterfinals. Hamburg is quietly confident.

That is what sport does that no tool can replicate. It gives distributed teams a common storyline, one that has nothing to do with a client, a deadline, or a delivery. For a company spread across Vietnam, Egypt, and Germany, the World Cup is one of the few events where everyone is watching the same thing at the same time and actually cares about the outcome.

The apps made that shared moment more Gradion. More interactive, more competitive, more fun.

Built by Uyen and Josh. Powered by curiosity, Claude, and too much football.