How Qatar Museums Built an AI Tour That Actually Reaches Visitors 

Plenty of museums are experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI), but far fewer have progressed past the pilot stage to deliver something visitors actually use.

Qatar Museums (QM) is a rare exception. Its AI Tour is the world’s first national, AI-powered cultural and art tour, marking a significant milestone in cultural innovation. As a nationally backed, app-free platform, it integrates conversational, generative, and personalisation AI to guide visitors through museums, creative hubs, public art, and heritage sites as a single, customisable, connected journey.

Naturally, the team behind this groundbreaking initiative has firm views on exactly why it works. 

Culture lives everywhere, but visitors experience it in fragments

Picture the familiar scenario. You arrive in a new city. How do you actually explore its art and culture? You might seek out a museum, hunt for landmarks, or just wander and hope to stumble on something.

The problem, as Vineetha Muringayil, Senior Digital Products Specialist at QM sees it, is that culture rarely sits in one place. “Culture rarely exists in just one place,” she says. “It lives across museums, public art installations, heritage sites, and many other cultural experiences. Each of these cultural destinations tell a part of the country’s story, but visitors rarely get to experience the story as a connected journey.”

Muringayil leads the AI Tour’s development, and her focus is on how AI can help visitors make cultural exploration more personal, contextual, and connected. The fundamental question she and her colleagues kept coming back to was a simple one: How might we help audiences navigate the scale and richness of Qatar Museums while curating meaningful cultural journeys that adapt to their interests, location, time, and context? This core inquiry became the starting point and guiding philosophy for the entire platform.

AI as an enabler, not an end in itself

For Asma Al-Jefairi, director of Digital Experience at Qatar Museums, framing is everything. Plenty of institutions, she points out, treat AI as a goal in its own right. Qatar Museums took a different path. “We see AI as a strategic enabler, not just a technology layer, to provide more personalised, inclusive, and globally scalable experiences to our digital audiences,” she says.

The challenge she sets out is how to make sense of the layers of stories and content the institution already holds and then deliver them in a way moulded to each individual visitor. As Qatar’s leading cultural institution, bringing together museums, heritage sites, public art, exhibitions, and cultural programmes under one ecosystem, Qatar Museums is uniquely positioned to invest in shared AI platforms and scalable technologies that can also support partners and private cultural institutions as part of a connected national cultural ecosystem.  The answer was an experience that is scalable, global, and accessible, letting each person explore museums across Qatar in whatever way suits their own preferences, time, language, accessibility needs and interests.

How the AI Tour works

When a visitor opens the platform, it starts with a few questions. What are your interests in art and culture? How much time do you have to explore in a day? Are you travelling alone or with children?

From the answers, the AI Tour builds a personalised lattice-like itinerary, seamlessly linking several cultural locations around a shared theme. “You might start at a museum and then go on to explore a public art installation right next to it,” Muringayil explains, “and later you might even visit a heritage site connected to this theme.” Instead of presenting destinations in isolation, the AI Tour joins them into a single route.

Several features sit alongside the itinerary:

The AI Tour Generator creates personalised cultural journeys based on a visitor’s interests, available time, location, and preferences, helping each person discover experiences that are most relevant to them.

The Art Specialist is an AI -powered assistant that uses conversational AI and generative AI to answer questions about artworks and artefacts. A visitor can ask about a piece in a collection or snap a photo of a public art installation and ask who made it and when it was installed. The chatbot returns bite-sized information, just enough to give context to something a visitor might otherwise have walked straight past.

The Interactive Map connects destinations across Qatar, helping visitors discover nearby cultural experiences and navigate their journey with location-aware guidance.

The Art Lab lets visitors reimagine art pieces in their own visual style, a more creative, playful layer.

The Tour Passport is a digital souvenir, an illustrated collage of the highlights from a visitor’s journey.

Together—and with expansions of the experience into additional languages, like French and Chinese—these make the platform more interactive and engaging, especially for families and younger audiences.

Governance and keeping the institutional voice intact

The team took responsible AI use seriously from the outset.

Transparency was the starting point. Visitors are told plainly that they are using an AI-led experience generating an AI-led tour. There is no pretence about what sits behind the recommendations.

Protecting the institution’s curatorial voice mattered just as much. Al-Jefairi is precise about the line between what the AI generates and what it doesn’t. The AI builds the itinerary around a visitor’s interests and preferences, but the content about the artworks and sites stays Qatar Museums’ own curatorially verified material, not AI-generated text. By choosing the right model and setting firm guardrails, the team kept its content accurate and its voice consistent while still personalising at scale.

Lessons learned

Muringayil is candid about what the project taught them.

Visitors don’t think in institutional categories. Museums organise information around collections and exhibitions, but visitors ask simpler, more practical things: what art can I see nearby? Is this place suitable for children? One of the AI’s key jobs, she found, was translating institutional knowledge into something a visitor could actually use.

AI works best on a foundation of structured content. Having strong cultural knowledge already organised and accessible was what made it possible to connect destinations into a meaningful journey at all.

Personalisation does a lot of work. Tailoring itineraries to each visitor made them far more relevant than a generic list of sights.

And AI is not something you launch and leave alone. It needs constant monitoring and refinement based on how people actually use it. Muringayil describes the tool as a living thing that keeps changing.

Technology with purpose

Al-Jefairi is reflective on the bigger picture. People sometimes fear AI or feel unsure how to apply it in a cultural setting. Her view is that technology is never the end goal; it is a means to an end. The biggest consideration was balancing innovation with responsibility. In cultural and tourism contexts, you are not just deploying technology—you are stewarding heritage, narratives, and national identity. Used with purpose, clarity, transparency, and responsibility, it can transform the cultural experiences museums offer. For Qatar Museums, that meant ensuring AI outputs remained accurate, refined, and aligned with scholarly standards, while still being engaging and accessible.

What made the difference was treating the AI Tour as a strategic transformation project, not a technology experiment. Strong governance, cross-functional collaboration, and a clear national purpose helped align technology, curatorial teams, leadership, and partners around a shared vision. For Qatar Museums, the AI Tour has become a success story at a national scale, and one the organisation sees as a base for more technology-driven experiences across its cultural landscape. 

You can start your own personalised journey at aitour.qm.org.qa.

About Qatar Museums

Now marking its 20th anniversary, Qatar Museums (QM), the nation’s preeminent institution for art and culture, provides authentic and inspiring cultural experiences through a growing network of museums, heritage sites, festivals, public art installations, and programmes. QM preserves and expands the nation’s cultural offerings, sharing art and culture from Qatar, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) region with the world and enriching the lives of citizens, residents, and visitors.

Under the patronage of His Highness the Amir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and led by its Chairperson, Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, QM has made Qatar a vibrant centre for the arts, culture, and education in the Middle East and beyond. QM is integral to the goal of developing an innovative, diverse, and progressive nation, bringing people together to ignite new thinking, spark critical cultural conversations, and amplify the voices of Qatar’s people. Since its founding in 2005, QM has overseen the Museum of Islamic Art and MIA Park, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Qatar, 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, ALRIWAQ Art + Architecture, and QM Gallery Katara. Future projects include Dadu: Children’s Museum of Qatar, Art Mill Museum, Qatar Auto Museum and the Lusail Museum.

Through its newly created Creative Hub, Qatar Museums also initiates and supports projects—such as Fire Station, Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar, M7, the creative hub for innovation, fashion and design, Liwan Design Studios and Labs, and Design Doha—that nurture artistic talent and create opportunities to build a strong and sustainable cultural infrastructure.

Animating everything that Qatar Museums does is an authentic connection to Qatar and its heritage, a steadfast commitment to inclusivity and accessibility, and a belief in creating value through invention.

For more information visit https://qm.org.qa

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Asma Al-Jefairi, Director of Digital Experience at Qatar Museums, and Vineetha Muringayil, who leads the organisation’s AI Tour development, presented the AI Tour at the Museum AI Summit 2026.