As AI becomes increasingly integrated into business processes across industries, it is becoming impossible to ignore the fact that art galleries are incorporating it into their operations, officially or not. The Mark Spiegler Art Academy even created an entire course on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence and the Art Market,” designed and conducted by Spiegler along with four leading experts – Alan Lau, Amy Scala, Tim Schneider, and T. Ahmed Taylor. The AI in Exhibitions 2026 report released on Thursday confirms what many already suspected: the adoption of AI among exhibitions is widespread, unchecked, and accelerating.
Of the 103 exhibition professionals surveyed, 84% use AI, and four in ten use it regularly. However, 63% of respondents also reported that they did not receive any guidance or guardrails from management, and only 8% of exhibitions provided internal policies related to the use of AI – policies that are already standard in many other corporate environments. Even more troubling is the fact that 80% of those surveyed use these tools using personal accounts, suggesting they may be inadvertently sharing sensitive information – including pricing and customer data – without the gallery’s knowledge.
“It’s been more than three years since the public release of ChatGPT, and in that time we’ve heard relatively little about how AI is being used in the exhibition sector,” First Thursday founder Callum Hale-Thomson told the Observer. “Our report shows that this silence should not be confused with a lack of activity. Employees at almost every gallery we surveyed use AI in their daily operations, but almost always with little oversight or guidance from leadership.”
This alone should serve as a wake-up call to gallery owners, he said. “Without proper implementation, sensitive and collected data could be used to train AI models, shared with third parties or leaked. In an industry built on discretion and trust, the gap between how widely AI is used and how little governance surrounding it is should concern everyone.”
Hale-Thomson began interviewing galleries to create First Thursday — a platform for improving showroom customer management — around the time of ChatGPT’s launch in 2022. In each conversation with dealers and staff, he asked them if they had ever considered using AI in their daily work. The answer was consistently no. Two years later, ChatGPT began appearing on salespeople’s phones and Gemini co-wrote emails for galleries, yet no one in the industry seemed to seriously question the impact of AI on the world of commercial art—except in terms of AI-generated art, copyright, and plagiarism.
According to the survey, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the industry standard, with nine out of ten respondents reportedly using it. Google Gemini is the second most popular AI tool, with Cloud and Anthropic’s Perplexity coming in third and fourth. Most gallery professionals use AI in writing, with 78% of survey respondents using it to create and polish press releases, artist biographies, and emails to collectors. However, the single most common use of AI in the art world seems to be translation, between languages of course, but also as a means of shifting tones, emotional nuances and phrasing. On the operational side, galleries are using AI for research, account management and management (33 percent) and collector research (30 percent). Perhaps not surprisingly, despite the art world being a visually driven industry, only about a quarter of them use image creation tools like DALL-E and Midjourney. CRM and contact management are the least common use case at only 12 percent, likely because they require direct integration with existing databases, which many galleries don’t maintain in an easily integrated model.
The main driver of adoption is less about experience and more about the potential to fall behind others who are already using AI to improve workflows. Time pressure is the primary factor. The majority of survey respondents confirmed that running their business has become more operationally complex over the past two years, as they try to keep up with a rapidly expanding, global and ever-expanding industry while keeping headcount the same. Galleries have traditionally relied on unpaid (or underpaid) interns, but AI is increasingly taking over the time-consuming administrative work they otherwise would have otherwise handled.
Larger galleries are feeling these pressures acutely, with 44 percent of galleries with 11 or more employees acknowledging this pressure and the challenges of formally integrating AI support into their corporate governance. Small and medium-sized galleries have been more flexible in their adoption of AI, with many, if not most, simply improvising (especially when they do not have dedicated processes or technology staff).
However, gallery professionals at all levels share one concern, and it is not the possibility of job losses, ethical dilemmas, or potential client backlash. The top area of concern, according to the report, is accuracy. Two-thirds of respondents said they were concerned about AI producing incorrect information about artists or artworks.
However, as the survey highlights, familiarity breeds trust, and across all concerns measured, average users scored significantly lower than non-users. Despite concerns, most gallery professionals see the adoption of AI as inevitable and feel optimistic about its capabilities, with 62% agreeing that the art world is lagging behind in adopting the technology. There are more opportunities than threats, most said, and the ability to streamline administrative and operational processes would free up time to spend with artists and buyers. Even four out of ten expressed their enthusiasm. What’s missing, according to 55% of those surveyed, are AI tools specifically designed for the art world rather than general consumer platforms. More than half said they would invest in AI tools if they could see a clear return.
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