What does the future hold for the UK museum sector?
Inspired by The Future Habit: How to Gain an Edge With AI-Driven Foresight by David Skelton and Nicklas Berild Lundblad, I decided to find out what the future holds for the UK’s museums with some AI assistance.
Forecasting and strategy
Futures thinking has been on my mind lately. The world feels uncertain right now (although, perhaps it was ever thus) so long term planning feels challenging. Strategic foresight is one of the tools that can help. It’s something I used successfully with a recent client for a Board away day. Using four imagined near-future scenarios, Board members considered possible opportunities and threats in the lifecycle of the organisation’s next strategic plan.
Around the same time that I was planning that workshop, I spotted The Future Habit in the Waterloo station branch of Foyles. In essence the book outlines ways to use AI to shortcut or enhance forecasting processes. I gave David Skelton and Nicklas Berild Lundblad’s scenario planning process a whirl using the UK museum sector as an example.
Four scenarios
Here are four AI-generated scenarios for the UK museum sector in 2035. If you want to read the full Gemini chat transcript, including more detailed scenario narratives, you can find that below. It’ll give you a sense of how the scenarios were developed step-by-step.
The Digital Commonwealth: In this world, the state views culture as a vital digital public good. Physical museum buildings function primarily as high-tech broadcasting hubs and climate-controlled vaults, while the actual "museum experience" is democratised globally through open-access digital twins and AI-driven platforms.
The CulturePlex: Here, museums have evolved into hyper-commercialised tech platforms. Survival depends on monetising digital attention, licensing IP and partnering with gaming giants, entertainment franchises and tech conglomerates.
The Civic Sanctuary: Reacting against digital fatigue and screens, this world treats the museum as a radical physical refuge for social cohesion, local memory and mental wellbeing. Funded heavily by local metro mayors and health authorities, museums are judged strictly on their social impact metrics.
The Boutique Heritage Club: With public funding entirely dried up and a refusal to pivot to mass digital entertainment, physical museums survive by transforming into elite, high-end destination spaces funded by wealthy patrons, exclusive corporate memberships and premium physical hospitality.
AI generated image of an architect’s model of a futuristic museum
Process and prompts
After a bit of trial and error, this is the sequence of prompts that I used to generate the scenarios. It’s more or less the one laid out in The Future Habit. In this instance I used “UK museum sector” as the topic. Each prompt was inputted one-by-one.
Help me with a futures/forecasting exercise for [INSERT TOPIC HERE] to think about what factors will affect it by 2035. Firstly use the PESTLE framework to identify the key driving forces that will shape the future.
Select two high impact, high uncertainty drivers to create a two by two scenario matrix resulting in four distinct future worlds. Each quadrant will represent a different combination of how these critical uncertainties might unfold.
For each quadrant develop a vivid narrative describing how that future might unfold. These narratives should explore cause and effect relationships, key milestones and implications for various stakeholders
Finally develop strategic considerations for each scenario, highlighting robust strategies that would work across multiple futures
You may want to know that I used Gemini 3 in Thinking mode and I chose Gemini for no other reason than at Tangram we use the Google Workspace suite.
Reflections
Would I use AI again to generate future scenario narratives? Yes. Is it perfect? No. But that’s true of much of generative AI right now.
AI-driven forecasting processes are likely to be most useful when time is of the essence and depth is not a requirement. Arguably when absolute accuracy is not a requirement either. For example, thinking about the Board workshop I mentioned earlier, situations like these are ideal for using scenarios generated by AI as one of a series of inputs into a strategy development process or stimulus for a strategic discussion.
Will any of the scenarios Gemini has created for me come true? Who knows! But that’s not the point of foresight. The point is that when the future’s not certain, narrative scenarios are useful to think about some of the ways the future might play out and consider the strategic implications.
Gemini transcript
Note: The Gemini chat transcript from 19 May 2026 is pasted here more or less unedited - note the American spelling and grammar - with original formatting. The only thing I’ve removed is the questions that Gemini poses at the end of each response so that the transcript is more easily readable. Where Gemini presented a table or flow chart (sometimes in plain text format) some of these are screen grabs so they are as readable as possible on this blog.
Prompt: Help me with a futures/forecasting exercise for the UK museum sector to think about what factors will affect it by 2035. Firstly use the PESTLE framework identify the key driving forces that will shape the future.
This PESTLE analysis explores the macro-environmental forces shaping the UK museum sector toward the horizon of 2035.
To build a robust forecast, we must look at how the structural fractures and innovations of the mid-2020s—such as localized funding crises, the rise of community co-curation, and the integration of AI—will mature over the next decade.
🏛️ Political Forces
Hyper-Devolution of Culture: Cultural funding and strategy are increasingly dictated by regional metro mayors and combined authorities rather than Westminster. Museums must align heavily with local economic development, regional identity, and municipal place-making agendas to secure funding.
The Geopolitics of Repatriation: The debate around contested cultural artifacts has shifted from institutional ethics to formal state diplomacy. International relations heavily influence museum collections, with structured, government-sanctioned repatriation processes firmly embedded in UK foreign policy.
Strained Civic Backing: Persistent pressure on local council budgets means civic and regional museums face ongoing existential threats, widening the operational gap between well-funded national landmarks and vulnerable local heritage sites.
💰 Economic Forces
The Evolved Revenue Mix: The old debates over tourist levies and international visitor fees have settled into a standard hybrid model. National museums rely on a combination of international tourist entry fees and highly sophisticated, tiered subscription/membership schemes to subsidize free access for domestic visitors.
Commercial Asset Monetization: Pure public subsidy is a thing of the past. Successful museums function via highly collaborative commercial ventures, premium ticketed "blockbuster" pop-ups, and corporate/intellectual property (IP) cross-overs (such as high-profile gaming or brand partnerships).
Operational Optimization: Long-term inflation, energy volatility, and maintenance backlogs for historic buildings force museums to embrace lean, cross-functional staffing profiles and dynamically compressed operating hours.
👥 Social Forces
Radical Co-Curation: The traditional "expert-to-audience" monologue is obsolete. Driven by a societal shift toward "Cultural Citizenship" and community-led juries, museum programming is fundamentally co-created. Institutions that fail to reflect the diversity of their immediate communities risk losing their social license to operate.
Demographic Shifts & Sensory Design: An aging UK demographic, paired with heightened societal advocacy for neurodivergence and mental well-being, makes sensory-friendly layouts, quiet programming, and hyper-accessible physical design a baseline operational requirement rather than a premium add-on.
Demand for Historical Transparency: Audiences expect unvarnished honesty. Object labels, digital guides, and provenance narratives explicitly address colonial contexts, historical inaccuracies, and the uncomfortable realities of how collections were acquired.
💻 Technological Forces
AI-Driven Operations and Curation: Artificial Intelligence handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes—from automated collections cataloging and predictive conservation tracking to AI-driven marketing platforms that personalize the visitor journey before they even cross the threshold.
Immersive Digital Overlays: The physical "glass case" boundary has softened. Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are seamlessly woven into the physical space via wearable tech or personal devices, allowing touchless interaction, virtual restorations of damaged artifacts, and non-linear storytelling.
Open Digital Storage: To counter the reality that the majority of collections sit in physical dark storage, high-fidelity "digital twins" and interactive open-storage hubs allow global public access to artifacts that cannot be physically displayed.
⚖️ Legal Forces
IP, Licensing, and Digital Ownership: As 3D asset replication and digital museum experiences become highly commercialized, complex legal frameworks dictate who owns, profits from, and licenses AI-generated cultural content and digital replicas of historical objects.
Strict Subscription & Data Regulation: Museums must navigate tightly enforced consumer protection laws regarding recurring donor memberships, automated renewals, and the ethical harvesting of visitor biometric and behavioral metrics.
De-accessioning Frameworks: UK legislation has evolved to provide national boards with greater legal flexibility to permanently de-accession and return items to their countries of origin without violating historic statutory bans.
🌱 Environmental Forces
Net-Zero Mandates for Heritage Assets: Operating within older, energy-inefficient, Grade-listed buildings carries heavy financial penalties if carbon targets aren't met. Museums are forced to execute deep, highly complex retrofits of roofs, climate systems, and insulation.
Climate-Resilient Infrastructure: Accelerating extreme weather events in the UK (such as flash flooding and summer heatwaves) necessitate massive capital investment in disaster-proof, climate-controlled regional storage hubs.
Sustainable Exhibition Supply Chains: The high-carbon model of flying massive physical loans globally for temporary exhibitions has largely given way to circular-economy touring models, low-impact local collaborations, and digital-first exhibition lending.
Prompt: Select two high impact, high uncertainty drivers to create a two by two scenario matrix resulting in four distinct future worlds. Each quadrant will represent a different combination of how these critical uncertainties might unfold.
To map out the future of the UK museum sector in 2035, we have selected two critical uncertainties that carry both the highest potential disruption and the most unpredictable trajectories:
Funding & Governance Model (Horizontal Axis):
State-Subsidized / Civic-Centric: Driven by regional devolution, metro-mayor backing, and a mandate for social utility and "cultural citizenship."
Market-Driven / Commercialized: Driven by self-sufficiency, intellectual property (IP) monetization, global brand partnerships, and private capital.
Technological & Curatorial Delivery (Vertical Axis):
Digital-First / AI-Immersive: Heavy reliance on AI curation, augmented reality (AR/MR) overlays, global digital twins, and virtual access.
Hyper-Physical / Community-Led: Focus on the tangible object, raw physical spaces, face-to-face human interaction, and radical local co-curation.
The 2035 Scenario Matrix
💎 Scenario A: The Digital Commonwealth
High State Subsidy + Digital-First/AI-Immersive
In this world, the state views culture as a vital digital public good. Physical museum buildings function primarily as high-tech broadcasting hubs and climate-controlled vaults, while the actual "museum experience" is democratized globally through open-access digital twins and AI-driven platforms.
How it operates: AI handles the cataloging and customizes exhibit narratives based on the viewer’s cognitive profile. Rather than visiting London or Edinburgh, a user in Leeds explores a hyper-realistic AR overlay of an artifact in their local town square. Funding is secured through national digital infrastructure budgets.
The Vibe: High-tech, hyper-accessible, but physically sparse.
The Big Risk: The "loss of the real." Museums become so detached from physical place and tangible objects that they begin to feel like beautifully curated public software rather than historic institutions.
🚀 Scenario B: The CulturePlex
Market-Driven + Digital-First/AI-Immersive
Here, museums have evolved into hyper-commercialized tech platforms. Survival depends on monetizing digital attention, licensing IP, and partnering with gaming giants, entertainment franchises, and tech conglomerates.
How it operates: Museums look like interactive theme parks or mixed-reality arenas. Gamified "blockbuster" events dominate programming (e.g., an immersive, AI-generated Roman Britain experience co-produced with a major gaming studio). Entry to the physical building is dynamic, priced like airline tickets, while global audiences pay premium digital micro-transactions to unlock exclusive virtual galleries.
The Vibe: High-energy, spectacular, brand-saturated.
The Big Risk: Hyper-commercialization completely erodes historical integrity. If an exhibit doesn't generate data, engagement metrics, or corporate sponsorship, it is quietly deleted from the servers.
🤝 Scenario C: The Civic Sanctuary
High State Subsidy + Hyper-Physical/Community-Led
Reacting against digital fatigue and screens, this world treats the museum as a radical physical refuge for social cohesion, local memory, and mental wellbeing. Funded heavily by local metro mayors and health authorities, museums are judged strictly on their social impact metrics.
How it operates: The "expert curator" model is dead; exhibitions are entirely co-created via community juries. Technology is intentionally minimized to create "analog zones." Museums host community kitchens, warm spaces, repair cafés, and social prescribing hubs where doctors prescribe museum visits to combat loneliness and anxiety.
The Vibe: Warm, bustling, hyper-local, radically inclusive.
The Big Risk: Extreme provincialism. With funding tied exclusively to local social outcomes, museums lack the resources for global research, international loans, or avant-garde curation, leading to a decay in academic rigor.
🎟️ Scenario D: The Boutique Heritage Club
Market-Driven + Hyper-Physical/Community-Led
With public funding entirely dried up and a refusal to pivot to mass digital entertainment, physical museums survive by transforming into elite, high-end destination spaces funded by wealthy patrons, exclusive corporate memberships, and premium physical hospitality.
How it operates: Museums focus intensely on the aura of the authentic, physical object. They market themselves as ultra-premium, quiet spaces free from the noise of the modern digital world. Revenue is generated through high-ticket private dinners, exclusive "behind-the-glass" tours, and luxury retail partnerships.
The Vibe: Elegant, prestigious, quiet, highly exclusionary.
The Big Risk: Total alienation of the public. Museums revert to their 19th-century origins—playgrounds for the wealthy and privileged, completely disconnected from the broader, diverse communities that surround them.
Prompt: For each quadrant develop a vivid narrative describing how that future might unfold. These narratives should explore cause and effect relationships, key milestones and implications for various stakeholders
Here are the four vivid narratives exploring how these different worlds could unfold by 2035.
💎 Scenario A: The Digital Commonwealth
High State Subsidy + Digital-First/AI-Immersive
The Narrative
By 2035, the physical museum building has undergone a radical identity shift. Following a series of catastrophic infrastructure failures in the late 2020s—where aging roofs and failing HVAC systems collided with extreme UK weather—the government realized it could no longer afford to maintain thousands of historic bricks-and-mortar structures. In a landmark policy shift, the National Digital Cultural Infrastructure Act of 2029 rerouted billions from physical estate maintenance into a centralized, open-access cloud network.
Museums became "Data Vaults." The physical collections are securely sealed in highly efficient, automated regional repository hubs, while the front-facing museum exists entirely as a decentralized, AI-driven public utility.
[Physical Infrastructure Crisis] ➔ [State Pivots Funds to Tech] ➔ [Democratized Digital Commonwealth]
Key Milestones
2028: "The Great Climate Leak" – Flash floods damage three major regional museum basements, destroying uncataloged local history archives and forcing an emergency national digitization mandate.
2031: Launch of Albion OS – A state-subsidized, unified AI engine that aggregates every public collection in the UK into a seamless, hyper-realistic Mixed Reality (MR) network.
2033: The "Empty Gallery" movement peaks, as major national galleries lease their physical prime-real-estate buildings to housing or commercial ventures, keeping only small "holographic portal rooms" open to the public.
Stakeholder Implications
Museum Directors: Evolution from facility managers to digital rights guardians, data ethicists, and algorithmic curators.
The Public / Visitors: Total equity of access. A child in a remote Scottish village has the exact same access to the Rosetta Stone or a Turner painting via their smart-wearables as a resident of central London. However, "screen fatigue" is replaced by a profound cultural detachment; audiences miss the visceral awe of standing in front of the real, flawed physical object.
Curators & Archivists: Traditional roles are automated. Curators now function as "Prompt Engineers for Heritage," training AI models to contextualize history for diverse, multi-lingual global users.
🚀 Scenario B: The CulturePlex
Market-Driven + Digital-First/AI-Immersive
The Narrative
In this world, the complete collapse of central arts funding by 2028 forced the sector into the arms of the tech and entertainment giants. Museums survived by transforming into "CulturePlexes"—hyper-commercialized, experiential entertainment centers where heritage is treated as monetizable Intellectual Property (IP). History is no longer a passive learning experience; it is an interactive, gamified franchise.
To fund their operations, national museums entered massive joint ventures with gaming engines, streaming platforms, and global brands. The physical space is a constantly shifting, high-turnover arena of corporate-sponsored immersive spectacles, while the digital space is a battleground for attention and micro-transactions.
[Abolition of State Subsidy] ➔ [Corporate Joint Ventures] ➔ [Hyper-Monetized CulturePlexes]
Key Milestones
2029: The British Museum announces a 10-year exclusive IP integration deal with Epic Games and Sony, allowing players to explore hyper-accurate historical eras virtually while generating billions in digital licensing.
2031: The introduction of Dynamic Cultural Pricing across major city venues. Entry fees fluctuate by the hour based on social media trends, influencer check-ins, and algorithmic demand.
2034: A major corporate sponsor successfully sues a museum over an exhibition narrative, leading to a legal precedent where sponsors hold ultimate editorial veto power over historical interpretation.
Stakeholder Implications
Museum Directors: Function like tech start-up CEOs, answerable to corporate boards, venture capitalists, and strict quarterly engagement metrics.
The Public / Visitors: Highly engaging, thrilling, and jaw-droppingly spectacular experiences for those who can afford it. However, low-income families are priced out of both physical entry and premium digital tiers, creating a stark "cultural divide."
Traditional Academics: Pushed completely to the margins. History is aggressively rewritten or flattened to make it "gamifiable" and palatable to corporate sponsors.
🤝 Scenario C: The Civic Sanctuary
High State Subsidy + Hyper-Physical/Community-Led
The Narrative
By 2035, society has pushed back hard against the digital saturation of the 2020s. An epidemic of urban loneliness, paired with radical political devolution to local metro-mayors, has repurposed the museum as the ultimate physical infrastructure for social cohesion. Museums are no longer judged by visitor numbers or global prestige, but by their measurable impact on local public health and community resilience.
Funded largely through regional health budgets and social-care levies, these institutions have stripped back technology to create "analog oases." They are the warm, trusted, physical living rooms of the UK’s fragmented high streets.
[Digital Burnout & Isolation] ➔ [Metro-Mayors Fund Social Utility] ➔ [Museum as Social Infrastructure]
Key Milestones
2027: The NHS officially rolls out "Cultural Prescriptions" nationwide, directly funding museums to run physical, hands-on object handling sessions to combat loneliness and cognitive decline.
2030: The People’s Curation Act passes in several combined authorities, legally mandating that 60% of museum gallery space must be co-curated and managed by randomly selected local citizen juries.
2032: Museums absorb bankrupt local libraries, community centers, and post offices, evolving into hybrid "Civic Hubs" that combine heritage with social services.
Stakeholder Implications
Museum Directors: Function as community organizers, social workers, and local diplomats rather than academic gatekeepers.
Local Communities: Deeply empowered and tightly bonded to their heritage. The museum is a vital place of daily belonging where they can repair items, discuss local issues, and see their own diverse stories reflected on the walls.
International Tourists: Find these spaces highly confusing and insular. The "blockbuster" international loans have vanished, as museums refuse to expend funds on things that do not directly benefit the local postal code.
🎟️ Scenario D: The Boutique Heritage Club
Market-Driven + Hyper-Physical/Community-Led
The Narrative
When local government insolvencies peaked in the late 2020s, hundreds of regional museums faced permanent closure. Refusing to bastardize their collections with digital gimmicks or mass-market commercialism, a segment of the sector chose elite preservation. They privatized, transforming into ultra-premium, high-end "Boutique Heritage Clubs" funded entirely by wealthy patrons, corporate memberships, and luxury hospitality.
In this world, the "aura" of the authentic, physical object is treated as the ultimate luxury asset. In an automated, digital world, standing alone in a room with a real 17th-century painting is a privilege reserved for the global elite.
[Local Council Bankruptcies] ➔ [Privatization & Elitist Pivot] ➔ [Exclusive Analog Sanctuaries]
Key Milestones
2028: A consortium of independent museums transitions to an "Equity Membership Model," requiring a peer-voted application and a five-figure annual fee to access their galleries.
2031: The "Analog Luxury" trend peaks; elite travelers pay massive premiums for "zero-signal, zero-screen" physical museum tours guided by high-profile historians.
2033: The legal deregulation of the UK Heritage Act allows private museum clubs to permanently buy public collections from bankrupt councils, locking them behind private clubhouse doors.
Stakeholder Implications
Museum Directors: Function like luxury hotel general managers or high-end art dealers, catering to the specific whims of billionaire trustees and corporate oligarchs.
The Public / Visitors: Completely disenfranchised. Publicly owned historic assets are effectively sequestered behind wealth barriers, reducing the general public's access to heritage to pictures in textbooks.
Conservators & Artisans: Highly valued and lavishly funded. Because the physical integrity and "exclusivity" of the object is the core selling point, traditional craftsmanship and meticulous conservation thrive within these private enclaves.
Prompt: Finally develop strategic considerations for each scenario, highlighting robust strategies that would work across multiple futures
To navigate these vastly different potential futures by 2035, the UK museum sector must transition from reactive planning to dynamic, scenario-guided strategy. Below are the specific strategic considerations for each individual quadrant, followed by a set of "No-Regret Moves"—robust strategies that will serve an organization well no matter which world becomes reality.
🎯 Scenario-Specific Strategic Considerations
💎 Scenario A: The Digital Commonwealth
If you are heading toward a subsidized, digital-first future, your focus must shift from real estate to data architecture.
Invest in "Data-First" Architecture: Stop viewing digitization as a marketing tool. Shift capital allocation away from physical gallery revamps and toward high-fidelity 3D asset creation, semantic web metadata, and open-source API development.
Master Algorithmic Curation: Train existing curatorial teams to become data trainers. The goal is to ensure that when public AI models synthesize your collection for a user, they do so using ethically sound, historically accurate training data provided directly by your institution.
🚀 Scenario B: The CulturePlex
If you are heading toward a market-driven, digital-first future, you must act like a media company.
Establish IP and Licensing Frameworks: Secure the digital rights to your collections now. Build a sophisticated legal and commercial team capable of negotiating complex royalty, copyright, and digital-twin licensing deals with tech and entertainment conglomerates.
Develop Agility in "Immersive" Production: Build institutional capabilities in spatial computing, virtual reality design, and gamification. Physical gallery layouts should be designed like film sets—modular, highly wired, and easily reconfigured for high-turnover, tech-driven exhibitions.
🤝 Scenario C: The Civic Sanctuary
If you are heading toward a subsidized, physical-first future, your building must become an essential civic utility.
Redefine Success Metrics: Shift away from vanity metrics like international visitor numbers. Develop robust frameworks to measure and prove local social impact, mental wellbeing improvement, and community cohesion to unlock regional health and devolution funding.
Co-Curation Infrastructure: Build formalized, permanent structures for community governance. This means moving past tokenistic advisory boards and implementing binding citizen juries that have genuine veto power over exhibition programming and localized budgets.
🎟️ Scenario D: The Boutique Heritage Club
If you are heading toward a market-driven, physical-first future, you must master ultra-premium value delivery.
Cultivate High-End Philanthropy Pipelines: Shift donor relations from broad-base memberships to deep, relational, high-net-worth cultivation. The value proposition must center on exclusivity, unprecedented physical access to curators, and elite preservation stewardship.
Elevate the "Analog Experience": Invest heavily in high-end hospitality, sensory architecture, and bespoke, distraction-free gallery environments. The physical museum must look and feel like an oasis of quiet privilege, justifying high entry or membership price points.
🛡️ Robust "No-Regret Moves" Across All Futures
No matter which quadrant of the matrix your institution ultimately inhabits, certain foundational strategies are universally beneficial. These are your core strategic pillars for the next decade:
