The AI conversation in the museum sector is dominated by large institutions with dedicated digital teams. But 80% of Germany’s 6,800+ cultural institutions have no in-house tech staff at all. Here’s what starting with AI actually looks like for them.

Germany holds some of the world’s most significant — and most fragmented — records on Nazi-era art displacement. RAG systems don’t solve the moral complexity of restitution, but they can collapse the years of archival research into weeks.

Most museum chatbot pilots fail for the same reason: they’re built on generic LLMs with no grounding in the collection. A visitor asking about a specific Cranach altarpiece gets a Wikipedia summary. That’s not good enough.