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.

Most museum collections are sitting on decades of inconsistent metadata — free-text descriptions, abbreviations, missing fields. GenAI doesn’t just automate the backlog; it changes what’s possible.