Museums + Heritage Show 2026: holding technology to a higher standard

Amalie Widerberg

Last updated on: 28. May 2026

Last week in London, the Museums Heritage Show brought together museum directors, heritage officers, curators, marketers, and the technology vendors who support them. As a tech vendor, staying close to the people we serve is essential, and few events make that easier than this one.

I came home with a notebook full of observations, but one impression has stayed with me above the rest: the cultural heritage sector is unafraid of technology, but it will not adopt it for technologys sake.

This is a sector that thinks carefully. It looks at every new tool and asks two questions before anything else. Does this serve our mission? And does it do so in a sustainable manner?

The conversation about AI was honest, not hyped Unsurprisingly, AI was mentioned frequently at the show. What was interesting was the maturity of the conversation around it. Yes, AI can help with multiple tasks and projects, but the discussions were also openly weighing the costs: the environmental footprint of large-scale data storage, the energy demands of data centers, and the very real impact on artists and creative professionals whose livelihoods depend on work that AI is increasingly being asked to do.

The takeaway was not that AI is bad. It was that AI deserves thoughtfulness. Where AI helps cultural institutions clean up messy structures, surface what is buried, prevent theft and counterfeit, or reduce the friction between a piece of content and the person who needs it, it becomes an enabler of clarity and sustainability rather than a contributor to noise. These are the types of use-cases Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) are watching most closely, and I think that makes sense.

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Authentic storytelling, and the hidden gems A recurring topic across the show was the question of how museums hold an audiences attention in a landscape dominated by doom scrolling, fake news, and AI slop. The conclusion was strikingly consistent: chasing algorithms is a losing strategy, but telling real stories is not.

Every cultural institution has a handful of famous stories, the ones already on every postcard and Wikipedia entry. Real engagement comes from the hidden gems: the lesser-known objects, people, and moments that the average visitor has never encountered. Finding those stories require quite a bit of work, and they must be told in an engaging, correct and respectful manner, with care for both history and the descendants of the people involved. This requires a level of human judgment that no algorithm can supply.

Read more: Rijksmuseum case study - Empowering storytelling with DAM

Finding hidden gems with DAM Here, I notice a clear link to Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions. Hidden gems do not surface themselves. Rather, they live inside collections that have grown for decades, sometimes centuries, across formats, locations, and naming conventions. The asset that holds the next great story is often stored somewhere already, it's just not discoverable. A well-structured DAM, with rigorous metadata and thoughtful taxonomies, is the difference between a collection that hides its own treasures and a collection that promotes varied and authentic storytelling.

A DAM is not a system that composes the stories, nor one that tells them. However, it provides the storytellers their material: faster, more accurately, and with the context.

In the age of AI, well-told stories risk being drowned out by an inflation of the obvious, which could only result in a growing appetite for those lesser known. If technology can help museum professionals locate, understand, and contextualize the stories that would otherwise stay buried, technology earns its place and becomes an invaluable resource.

Community as a source of stories Another recurring topic during the event was the focus on community engagement, both local and digital. I found it particularly interesting to witness how communities are not just treated as audience but also co-authors. When museums involve their communities in the storytelling, the quantity and quality of stories both go up, and the hidden gems become easier to find and highlight, because the people who know them are included in the process.

It's fair to say that authentic storytelling and community building are becoming defining communications tactics for GLAMs. Technologys role is not to compose the stories or to tell them. Rather, it's to enable institutions to tell more of them, to more people, with the structure and speed that scale requires.

Read more: RISD Museum - A connected ecosystem for digital art collections

Where AI gets uncomplicated: governance & provenance Not every AI and technology use-case stirs an ethical debate. One of the clearer examples I saw was the use of unique, non-editable identifiers that document a physical objects traceable identity, defending it against theft, deep-fakes, and counterfeits. An assets story and value rest on its heritage, and using technology to preserve that heritage faster, more securely, and more sustainably is a clear win. It frees institutions to spend their time on the work only humans can do and offers genuine peace of mind to anyone responsible for the assets in question.

A commercial mindset, applied with care Monetization was a recurring theme, treated with more directness than what one might have experienced a few years back. The most thoughtful examples I saw were multi-level income strategies built across retail, hospitality, and location rentals to private clients and film crews alike.

The institutions doing this best have been willing to think beyond the usual funding paths,

LINK:	https://www.fotoware.com/blog/museums-heritage-show-2026-holding-techn...
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