AI Service Agents Hackathon
Hackathon · Hosted by Lumen Labs. Autonomous support agents that resolve customer tickets end to end across chat and email, built in forty-eight hours.
About this open call
The brief
Lumen Labs is looking for autonomous support agents that resolve customer tickets end to end across chat and email. Today a ticket in either channel still waits for a person to read it, decide what to do and close it, so the queue sets the pace of support rather than the work in it. They want an agent that finishes the routine ticket on its own and knows when to stop, not an assistant that drafts a reply for somebody else to send.
What they're looking for
Forty-eight-hour builds of agentic systems that close tickets without a human in the loop: retrieval over the help content a support team already keeps, actions that change the state of an order or an account, and a hand-off that fires before the agent starts guessing. A strong entry shows a ticket arriving and being resolved in the channel it came in on, says what the agent does with the ticket it cannot resolve, and is honest about which of chat and email the build reached. Entries that only classify, tag or summarise a ticket leave the closing to a person, which is the part of the job this brief is about.
Problem statements
Closing the ticket, not routing it
Most support automation classifies, tags and suggests, and then a person still reads the ticket and closes it. We want the routine ticket resolved end to end, in the channel it arrived in, with no queue left behind it.
Knowing when to stop
An agent that never escalates is worse than no agent. The hand-off has to fire on the ticket the agent cannot resolve, and the customer should not have to explain themselves a second time when it does.
One agent, chat and email
Chat is short turns with somebody waiting; email is long, threaded and answered hours later. A build that works in one of them leaves the other channel to a person.
Evaluation criteria
100% weighted total
Timeline
- Jun 15, 2026
Registration opens
Open to startups & partners. Each entry is a forty-eight-hour build.
- Aug 7, 2026
Submissions close
Final deadline to submit your entry and the working demo behind it.
- Aug 14, 2026
Host review & shortlist
Lumen Labs scores entries and shortlists finalists.
- Aug 21, 2026
Winner announced
The strongest build moves to a funded pilot.
Sponsors & partners
Lumen Labs
Host
TechStars
Co-hosting the hackathon
ETH Zürich
Reviewer and mentor pool
FAQs
Who can take part?
Any startup or partner organisation in the ecosystem. One entry per team, however many people are on it.
What does it cost?
Nothing — taking part is free. Joining follows the event; submitting enters your build for the pilot.
How long do we get to build?
Forty-eight hours. The entry is what your team built in that window, and the form asks what existed before it started. Submit when you are ready — an entry is final once sent, so it is worth using the whole window.
What happens after we submit?
Lumen Labs reviews entries after the deadline and shortlists finalists. The strongest build moves to a funded pilot.
Take part
Submit your entry before the deadline. Every entry is scored against the criteria above.