How is AI revolutionizing the welcome and engagement of cultural tourism customers? Meeting with Marion Carré from Ask Mona

Since 2020, the Musée des beaux-arts de Québec (MNBAQ) has been committed to a human-centered approach to designing products and services that meet the real needs of its visitors. We set out to explore new ways of engaging our audiences with our collections and at the same time – why not? – set up an innovative digital interpretation platform, offering visitors the chance to interact with the works of art in an interactive and instructive way.

In this context, we have initiated a collaboration with Ask Mona. Since 2017, the French company has specialized in creating conversational agents and interactive solutions to enrich the visitor and employee experience. Together, we set out to design an innovative conversational agent, capable of answering visitors’ questions about artworks in an engaging and informative way.

Our conversational agent represents a new era in interaction with art, combining expertise in artificial intelligence with the richness of our artistic heritage.

As part of the work with the AI+Tourism Working Group, I was keen to put a few questions to Marion Carré, President and co-founder of Ask Mona, to highlight how AI solutions, focused on visitor welcome and hospitality, address the challenges of the cultural and tourism sectors while optimizing the visitor experience.

As AI experts, how do you see your solutions being integrated into the cultural and tourism sectors to drive business innovation?

We don’t see our AI solutions solely as tools to drive business innovation, but rather as a response to the real-world challenges faced by cultural and tourism players. Our priority is welcome and hospitality: how can we effectively inform visitors before they arrive, to encourage them to come? To achieve this, we deploy AIs that answer questions from the public in advance, thus facilitating the work of our reception teams. During the visit, our solutions focus on enhancing the value of territories and collections by enabling an interactive dialogue between visitors and works or points of interest, thanks to AI.

What challenges have you identified when implementing AI in cultural institutions like MNBAQ, and how have you overcome them?

At MNBAQ, we’ve been lucky enough to work with a team that’s open to innovation, which has been an invaluable asset. This has enabled us to implement an iterative approach to progressively adjust the functionality of our tool in line with feedback from visitors and teams. For example, we’ve found that some visitors can experience a kind of “blank page syndrome” when they’re given the opportunity to ask as many questions as they like about a work of art. To compensate for this, we have adjusted our system by integrating AI-generated question suggestions and automatic reminders. This made it easier to guide visitors through the discovery process.

How can your conversational agents help museums and tourist attractions better understand and meet visitors’ needs?

One of the advantages of our conversational agents is that they generate a large amount of usage data from visitor interactions. This data gives cultural institutions a clearer picture of what their visitors are looking for. For example, they can identify which works are most frequently questioned, the type of questions asked, and when visitors use these tools. This not only gives us a better understanding of visitors’ expectations, but also of the issues they face.

What are the measurable impacts of your AI projects on visitor engagement and satisfaction in museums?

Surveys carried out with partner museums show very encouraging results: in two studies carried out in different countries, 96% of users judged the content provided by AI to be relevant and felt they had learned something. This demonstrates a positive impact on visitor satisfaction. What’s more, we’ve found that our devices increase engagement rates compared to apps and audioguides, with engagement 3 to 4 times higher. Upstream of the visit, AI also saves teams valuable time, as demonstrated by a Swiss institution we work with, which has saved between 400 and 500 hours of work per year.

How can your AI solutions help museums quickly adapt their offerings in line with changing visitor trends and preferences?

AI, and more specifically interaction through dialogue, enables museums to anchor themselves in visitors’ habits and uses. Indeed, when we visit a museum, we often want to discuss the works, ask questions or take photos. Based on these practices, we offer solutions that integrate naturally with the visitor experience, while bringing innovation to the table. What’s more, the feedback obtained through these interactions provides museums with valuable data on visitor preferences and expectations. This enables them to quickly identify the subjects or works of greatest interest, and to adapt their offerings accordingly, for example by creating new thematic itineraries or enriching content on the most popular works. This ability to adapt is essential if we are to meet the rapidly changing expectations of our visitors and maintain their commitment.