/ About this event
Museums exhibit AI, use it to catalogue and open their collections, and must decide where to draw the line. Leaders from museums in the SF Bay Area and Switzerland discuss what to automate and what to leave to humans.
Every technology cycle puts the same decision in front of museums: What to explore, what to reject, and where to draw the line. With AI, some institutions treat it as a subject to exhibit and examine. Others use it to change how collections are catalogued, searched, and reached.
Museums are also an unusually strong use case. They hold collections and archives that have been catalogued, tagged, and provenanced over centuries, which is the kind of material current AI systems learn from. In recent years, museums have worked to open these collections to the public. That openness now means the data can be scraped, synthesized, and reorganized by others, which puts pressure on curatorial authority: Wwho interprets a collection once anyone can rework it?
Three questions follow. What is the value of a machine-readable archive, and for whom? If everything is available digitally, does the in-person encounter with an object and the physical visit become more valuable or less? And what role do contemporary artists play in examining these systems critically?
The panel asks each speaker where their own practice and institution have drawn the line, and what they have decided not to automate. The conversation moves across three levels of adoption: personal use, professional practice, and organizational stance. It closes by shifting from forecasting to design: how should this future be shaped, which values and priorities should guide it, and which of today’s claims are hype and which will last?
This is part of a series of roundtables Swissnex in San Francisco is hosting with Bay Area museum professionals ahead of the Future Museum Lab, which brings six museum professionals from Switzerland to San Francisco in October 2026.
The event includes a panel discussion followed by a Q&A session, and networking.
SPEAKERS: Toshi Anders Hoo, Principal Design Strategist, Possibility Spaces
Claudia Schmuckli, Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Sonja Thiel, Curator & Phd Student, UC Berkeley
Gianni Jetzer, Director Kunstmuseum St.Gallen
This event is a part of #SFTechWeek—a week of events hosted by VCs and startups to bring together the tech ecosystem. Learn more at www.tech-week.com.
