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

Authentic storytelling, and the hidden gems

A recurring topic across the show was the question of how museums hold an audience's 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. Technology's 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 object's traceable identity, defending it against theft, deep-fakes, and counterfeits. An asset's 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, building partnerships with private individuals and organizations that have produced budgets independent of government support and charity. The discipline behind that work is an audience-first outlook applied with commercial seriousness.

There is a lesson here for the whole sector: a societal mission and a commercial mindset are not opposites. When done with care, they reinforce each other.

Read more: MuseumPlus and Fotoware - the integration for improved Collection Management

Collaboration, and the work ahead

The final thread running through the show was cross-organizational collaboration. Innovation does not move quickly when institutions work in isolation. The museums and trusts that have built good structures for learning from each other are the ones moving fastest, and the appetite for more of that collaboration was visible everywhere on the floor.

Watch the webinar: Streamlining museum workflows - MUNCH Museum, the Historical Museums of Sweden, and the Norwegian National Museum

I left London with the clear sense that this sector is doing an impressive job of holding technology to its proper standard. GLAMs don’t embrace it for the sake of being innovative, or for outsourcing meaningful work. Rather, they’re looking for tools that let them tell more stories, more authentically, to more people, while preserving what matters about the work in the first place. Balance and respect applied to both the mission and the technology that support it.