See you at BaselHack 2026! (:

The Post-Website Business

Hotels and restaurants used to need their own website. Then Google Maps, booking platforms and review sites absorbed that role. Now the first visitor is often an AI agent that books without ever opening a browser. 

Show us what a local business publishes next when the visitor is an AI — and prove it works.

We are Adobe. We build the tools businesses use to create and manage their digital presence, and increasingly the systems that help them stay found and represented as AI enters the picture. This challenge comes from the team working on AI brand visibility and agent-facing content: helping brands stay accurately found, cited and represented as AI and agents become the ones doing the reading. We want the Basel community’s creativity on where this is heading, not a finished product.

Postdate: 10.10.2026

Sponsor: Adobe

Prize Money: CHF 1,500.00

Problem Statement

How might a local business (hotel, restaurant, café, shop, service provider)
establish and control its presence in a web where the primary "visitor" is an AI
agent rather than a human browsing pages?

Deliberately broad and open. Pick the angle that excites your team. Some directions to spark thinking. This isn't a checklist or a spec, and inventing your own angle is encouraged and rewarded:

  • The agent-facing storefront. A business exposes its offering (rooms, tables, menu, hours, availability, price, policies) as something an agent can query and act on — e.g. an MCP server — instead of, or alongside, a website. What does "publishing" mean here? What does the owner see and edit?
  • Discovery & trust. In a world of agent-mediated choice, how does a business get found and believed? Verifiable claims, reputation, provenance (proving where a claim about your business actually came from), spam resistance, "why did the agent pick this one?"
  • The transaction. Agent negotiates and completes a booking/order end to end through whatever agent-queryable interface you propose. Confirmation, changes, cancellation, payment hand-off, edge cases.
  • The owner's experience. The café owner is not a developer. How do they set all this up in minutes and stay in control of how they're represented?
  • Representation & fairness. Who decides how a business is described to the AI? How does a small player avoid being flattened into a generic result or losing to whoever games the system?
  • The human fallback. Humans and agents will coexist for years. How does one presence serve both without maintaining two of everything?

Context

Think about how a small hotel or a neighbourhood restaurant has shown up online
over the last 25 years:

  • ~2000s: everyone needed their own website. That was the presence.
  • ~2010s–today: the website matters less. Discovery, booking, menus, reviews, photos and even "call now" all live inside Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, OpenTable, Instagram and similar aggregators. The business fills in structured profiles; the platforms own the interface.
  • Emerging: the first interaction is increasingly an AI. A traveller asks an assistant "book me a quiet, dog-friendly hotel near Basel's main train station (Basel SBB) under CHF 200 with late check-in" and never visits a website or a map at all. The agent reads, compares, decides and books.

If that trajectory continues, the primary surface stops being the human-facing
website, or even the human-facing platform UI. The business still needs to be
discoverable, accurately represented, bookable and trustworthy, but to a
machine. Does that mean an MCP server instead of a homepage, a structured,
verifiable "business object" that agents can query and trust, or something nobody
has named yet?

This is not sci-fi. It's already happening, and nobody has a settled answer yet.
We're less interested in "yet another CMS" and much more interested in a
credible, imaginative picture of the future plus a prototype that makes it
tangible. Getting this right matters for millions of small businesses that can't
afford to lose the discovery game a second time. That's the frame this challenge
asks you to fill in.

Must-haves

Two things, weighted together:

  1. A vision. A clear, believable articulation of how local-business web
      presence looks in ~5–10 years — the concept, the actors, why it's plausible.
      A short deck / narrative / demo storyboard is fine.
  2. A prototype. Something that runs and demonstrates a real slice of that
      vision — e.g. an agent successfully discovering and booking a fictional Basel
      hotel through whatever interface you propose. It doesn't need to be complete,
      but the core mechanism should genuinely work, not be faked end to end.

You don't need an engineer on your team to pick this challenge. BaselHack team
formation is designed to mix skill sets, and we'd rather see a small,
honestly-scoped working slice than a large team's unfinished one.

Back to challenge overview