AI in Museums: What Does Artificial Intelligence Mean for the Industry?
The emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI) in museums sparks both excitement and hesitation. While some institutions embraced AI as early adopters, others maintain their distance for now, preferring to observe its evolution and impact on the sector.
For all museums, the decision to implement AI requires careful forethought and planning.
Leadership teams often question if their institution has the resources, time, and staff needed to adapt to this new technology. There are also deeper questions about its ethical and responsible use, particularly given museums’ responsibility as stewards of cultural heritage.
That being said, AI in museums holds immense potential when deployed with care. AI-powered solutions can transform behind-the-scenes operations and front-of-house visitor experiences, enabling institutions to become more engaging, accessible, and efficient.
The key is viewing AI not as an all-or-nothing proposition—but as a flexible tool that can be integrated gradually, while supporting your museum’s ethics, sustainability goals, and data security needs.
Raising the subject of AI in museums
Let’s be real—artificial intelligence is a divisive topic in the museum world.
When AI comes up in conversation, it’s often met by a mix of curiosity, cautious optimism, and balanced pragmatism from industry professionals. And this measured approach makes perfect sense.
Museums act as stewards of cultural heritage, entrusted with preserving cultural heritage, upholding public trust, and protecting vast amounts of collections data, digital assets, and even visitor information.
Evaluating any new technology must go beyond its practical benefits to assess how well it aligns with an institution’s ethics and the broader social good.
Webinar series: Navigating AI for Museums
Curious about AI’s potential at your institution? Want to ask your questions to industry experts?
Register for our upcoming webinar series, Navigating AI for Museums: A Purposeful Approach to Innovation, starting January 15, 2025.
This three-part series, led by industry experts, will delve into the possibilities and potential pitfalls of integrating AI into your operations and workflows.
Where do museums stand on AI?
Many museums are exploring artificial intelligence, but attitudes and adoption rates across the sector remain varied.
At AAM’s 2024 Future of Museums Summit, attendee polling yielded some insights during the session, “Exploring AI Hype, Hope, Help, and Harm: Practical and Aspirational Work Underway at Three Museums.”
Despite 72% of respondents sharing that their museums actively discussed how AI could be used, actual adoption rates varied a lot. Only 33% were using the technology on a daily basis, while 27% confessed they weren’t sure AI was allowed.
Another 40% admitted they were exploring AI's capabilities, but hadn’t yet identified clear benefits for their operations.
This session also revealed a split in perspectives about AI's future impact: 52% of respondents anticipated generally helpful outcomes over the next five years, while 42% felt it was too early to make predictions.
Notably, just 6% predicted the outcomes of AI in museums as generally harmful.
Which museum departments benefit from AI?
Adopting AI in museums can benefit staff across many departments, both for internal operations and public outreach.
Here’s how different teams might leverage AI to refine their tasks and workflows:
Curatorial and Collections Management: Curators can harness AI to analyze visitor data and art history patterns to better inform their exhibition content and layouts. For collections teams, AI streamlines object classification and tagging. Automating these workflows can make data more accessible, accurate, and searchable within their collections management system (CMS), plus it reduces the time spent on manual cataloging.
Digital Asset Management: Accelerate DAM workflows through automated tagging and metadata creation, significantly improving asset searchability. AI-powered digital asset management systems (DAMS) can process unstructured content—including images, videos, and handwritten documents—using OCR transcription for full discoverability. Users also benefit from intelligent search features, which deliver more nuanced, context-aware results.
Conservation: Future-proof preservation efforts by predicting object deterioration with AI monitoring systems. AI has already demonstrated remarkable capabilities in cultural heritage restoration, such as predicting the original colors of Gustav Klimt's lost fresco, Medicine (1900-1907), and digitally reconstructing the trimmed edges of Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642).
Education and Engagement: Personalize learning experiences by creating interactive exhibits and digital tools with AI. The technology enables innovative approaches to audience engagement, as seen in the viral success of Google Arts & Culture's Art Selfie app and interactive chatbots that bring museum collections to life.
Marketing and Development: AI-powered analytics help evaluate visitor feedback and behavior patterns, providing deeper insights into audience preferences and needs. Development teams can leverage AI to analyze donor datasets, identifying trends and opportunities to enhance fundraising strategies and donor engagement.
Operations and Administration: Forecast visitor trends at your museum to optimize ticket availability and the scheduling of staff, especially during peak seasons when traffic spikes. AI algorithms and sensors can also help predict equipment failures, resulting in faster repairs, less downtime, and reduced spend on maintenance.
Research and Scholarship: Optimize scholarly work by using AI to spot patterns and links that humans might miss. By analyzing huge amounts of historical data, AI can help researchers discover new connections between objects and deepen their understanding of collections.
Visitor Services: Power interactive guides with AI—such as chatbots or virtual assistants—to answer visitors’ questions, offer recommendations, and give personalized tours. AI can also make museums more accessible, with audio descriptions for visually impaired visitors and real-time sign language translation for Deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences.
Now that you understand the who, let’s look at the how of artificial intelligence in museums. Next, we’ll cover where AI can make a real difference with public-facing and internal initiatives.
Creating AI-powered visitor experiences
Artificial intelligence opens up new ways for museums to inspire, educate, and support their visitors.
When integrated into exhibitions, online collections, or educational materials, AI can transform how audiences of all backgrounds and ages connect with cultural heritage.
Personalized in-museum interactions
AI-powered interactivity is a powerful tool for personalizing visitor experiences. Delivered via chatbots or animated guides, this application of AI in museums empowers visitors to interact with collections on a deeper level.
Imagine this: you’re standing before a centuries-old artifact and using your smartphone to ask questions about its history, use, or cultural significance—that’s all possible with artificial intelligence.
AI can provide context-aware responses by drawing from vast databases of historical data, curatorial insights, and related collections. So, you feel like you’re actually conversing with a sentient being.
Some institutions are even piloting AI guides for personalized tours. By tracking visitors’ engagement and interests, these guides adapt their commentary and recommendations to create a one-of-a-kind experience for each museum guest.
Enhanced accessibility for visitors with disabilities
Artificial intelligence offers tremendous potential for improving museum accessibility. Through its many creative applications, AI has begun reducing and resolving long-time access barriers for visitors with disabilities.
Some exciting AI-powered solutions to enhance your institution’s accessibility include:
Audio descriptions: Make your exhibitions accessible to visitors who are blind or visually impaired with AI. Museums can capture and share the nuances of their art through audio descriptions, generated via a smartphone camera or smart glasses. This AI-powered audio technology can also offer real-time guidance and exhibit information.
3D printing: Transform two-dimentional artwork into tactile experiences. By converting visual artwork into 3D-printed forms—able to be held and touched— cultural institutions empower more diverse audiences to interact with their collections.
Accessibility map: Guide visitors with mobility impairments through your museum by providing information on accessible routes and facilities via an AI-powered app or on-site guide.
Real-time captions: Improve the accessibility of your museum’s online events and tours with AI captions. These captions transcribe speech in real time, making your spoken content more digestible for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing, neurodivergent, or non-native speakers.
Sensory-friendly apps: Exhibitions with loud noises or flashing visuals can be overwhelming to some visitors. Institutions can use AI to create apps that help these guests plan their visits by identifying and mapping out these sensory-heavy displays.
Multilingual support and engagement
Language barriers no longer need to limit cultural exchange in museums. AI-powered translation is making collections more accessible—and welcoming!—to international and multilingual visitors.
Using AI for multilingual support can provide real-time translations of exhibition descriptions, educational materials, and guided tours, enabling visitors to experience exhibitions in their preferred language.
Streamlining museum operations with AI
Working behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is giving back something that museum professionals never have enough of: hours in the day.
AI is also capable of providing incredible insights, accelerating routine tasks, and helping with nearly every area of museum life—spanning collections management, digital asset management, conservation, and operations.
Predict museum visitation rates and behavior
Did you know AI analytics can transform how museums understand and respond to visitor patterns?
By generating heat maps of visitor movement and analyzing historical attendance data, cultural institutions can optimize everything from staffing levels to exhibit layouts. This data-driven approach allows for more informed decisions about resource allocation and space utilization.
Accelerate cataloging workflows
Cataloging and tagging digital assets takes up considerable time for museum teams. But AI is changing that through automated media tagging, able to identify objects, people, artistic styles, and even emotional content in images and videos.
The results? What might take a human cataloger hours can be accomplished by AI in minutes.
Powered by Microsoft Azure, Terentia’s platform brings AI-driven tagging to museums. Our AI tools can generate descriptive tags for photographs, videos, and documents, while also identifying relationships between items in your collections.
Get more out of your DAMS and CMS
Collections and digital asset management systems with AI capabilities offer boundless, new possibilities for data organization and discovery.
By harnessing natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, these modern platforms can:
Make digital assets discoverable: Turn videos, audio files, and unstructured content into searchable data in your DAMS. To elevate tagging, AI can generate video transcripts, segment scenes, and identify objects, faces, and even emotions. Or use OCR-powered transcription to extract from text images, PDFs, and handwritten text for 100% discoverability.
Optimize user searches: Get highly relevant results with AI-powered search. Unlike keyword-based search, AI deciphers the context and intent behind user queries. As an example: typing in “impressionist paintings of water” would yield search results similar to Monet’s water lilies—not just any paintings that happen to include water.
Deploy smart links and relationships: Identify in-depth connections between collections objects and data that humans might miss. For instance, AI might notice patterns in technique, subject matter, or historical context to link seemingly unrelated artifacts.
Enhance data mapping and imports: Deploy pattern recognition and user-defined rules to automate new data mapping to existing formats. AI can standardize data formats, identify potential errors, and suggest corrections during the migration processes.
Speed through admin work
Let AI handle the routine tasks consuming your staff’s workweek. That way, teams can spend more time directing their expertise toward the high-priority projects that deliver greater returns for your museum.
Consider using AI to help with the following admin work:
Streamline grant writing: Present AI with previous grant applications as a model and request a new version tailored to the funding opportunity you’re applying for. (For more insights, check out this article from Microsoft’s Darrell Booker on using AI for grant writing.)
Draft donor acknowledgement letters: Write personalized thank-you notes in seconds to nurture strong relationships with your museum's supporters.
Generate reports: Save time on manual data analysis by asking AI to create detailed reports on visitor data, exhibit performance, or financial metrics.
Respond to visitor inquiries: Use AI chatbots to communicate with visitors and answer their FAQs, such as opening hours and ticket prices.
Prepare documents for compliance and accreditation: Streamline how you create the reports and documentation needed for museum certifications, audits, or regulatory bodies.
Keep in mind: it’s always recommended that a human review any AI-generated materials before using or sharing them. While a real timesaver, the technology can also make mistakes.
Future-proof preservation and restoration
Leveraging AI-powered systems can transform how museum conservators approach preservation and restoration.
By analyzing an object and its environment, AI can generate condition reports, identify any risk factors, and suggest the next steps for optimizing collections care to prevent deterioration.
Let’s explore a few ways AI can support conservation teams:
Identify at-risk artifacts: Monitor the environmental conditions of collections objects to detect any threats and adjust climate controls for optimal temperature, humidity, and light levels.
Optimize storage conditions: Make recommendations to ensure sensitive materials, like textiles or paper, are kept in ideal conditions to minimize long-term damage.
Plan restoration schedules and strategies: Use AI-driven insights to schedule conservation efforts based on priority and need. AI can also suggest historically accurate materials and methods for restoration, plus provide predictive modeling to help evaluate the long-term effects of different techniques.
Deliver condition assessments: Detect and evaluate deterioration to museum artwork and artifacts, such as cracks, fading, or other damage, and predict future degradation patterns.
Reduce emergency costs: Fortifying preventive care with AI algorithms can help catch potential issues early and reduce the likelihood of costly, last-minute interventions to save deteriorating artifacts.
Future outlook for AI in museums
So, what’s next for AI in museums? While the technology is likely here to stay, many industry professionals remain uncertain about its future within cultural heritage.
After polling GLAM institutions across the United Kingdom, a survey by UK Heritage Pulse found that while 24% of respondents were already using AI, a staggering 65% hadn’t considered how they would use the technology in the future.
Choosing AI solutions with robust security and transparency around your data’s use and ownership will also be integral to its success in museums.
Terentia, for instance, provides an up-to-date AI use policy, committing to never share, expose, or misuse clients’ data and files. Our AI-powered platform is also built on Microsoft Azure to deliver industry-leading, cloud-native security for your collections data and digital assets.
Explore AI-powered workflows with Terentia
AI technology is no longer just a future possibility for museums. It’s a present reality that offers exciting ways to enhance internal operations, audience engagement, and day-to-day processes across cultural institutions’ many teams and departments.
By partnering with Terentia, museums can access Microsoft Azure-backed AI features designed to streamline collections and DAM workflows, while maintaining the highest standards of data security and ethical usage.
Curious about our platform? Request a live demo of Terentia’s AI features or contact our team with any questions you might have. We’d be happy to chat about your institution and its unique needs.
