AIKS StartUp Case Challenge 2026
Three tracks. Real business value.
Smart Hospitality: Sell More, Waste Less, Serve Better
Sponsor inspiration: Forbest • Himalaya • Lactasoy
The SME problem
Small hospitality businesses must balance customer demand, inventory, bookings, and service quality. A café may waste ingredients or run out of popular items, a hotel may struggle to plan room demand and add-on services, and tour operators must manage bookings, cancellations, and limited capacity. Meanwhile, sales data and customer feedback can be difficult to turn into useful decisions.
The business challenge
Build an AI-powered solution that helps a hospitality business use sales, inventory, booking, and customer feedback data to make smarter decisions, improve operations, and deliver better guest experiences.
Required deliverable
A working digital prototype that uses the provided hospitality dataset to identify a business opportunity and demonstrate actionable insights or recommendations.
What teams could build
- Demand insights: Identify sales or booking patterns across days, seasons, and promotions.
- Smarter inventory: Highlight potential waste, stock shortages, and preparation needs.
- Better guest experience: Analyze customer feedback to identify service issues and improvement opportunities.
- Booking and capacity planning: Explore cancellations, demand, and limited room or tour capacity.
- Business decision dashboard: Turn data across one or more hospitality services into clear recommendations.
Data room
Student dataset for this track — CSV files, data dictionary and README.
This case is inspired by the F&B and hospitality sponsor group: Forbest, Himalaya, and Lactasoy. The case is a proposed competition challenge, not a claim that these sponsors have confirmed this specific operational problem.
Competition principle: The sponsor group provides industry inspiration. Do not imply that sponsors have endorsed a specific problem statement or supplied internal data unless this has been confirmed.
Program Details & FAQ