Sparking Cultural Curiosity with AI

How Marion Carre and Ask Mona are igniting curiosity and learning in museums with ChatGPT

Background

When Marion Carré founded Ask Mona nearly ten years ago, she had a deceptively simple ambition: let people have a conversation with the Mona Lisa.

At the time, the technology wasn’t ready. Museums were still largely built around a one-to-many model. Curators created exhibitions. Visitors consumed them. Everyone received essentially the same experience—a wall label, an audio guide, a predetermined narrative.

But Carré believed curiosity didn’t work that way.

“Two people can stand in front of the same painting and have completely different questions,” she says. “Both questions are interesting.”

Today, that belief sits at the heart of Ask Mona, the Paris-based company helping museums, heritage sites, and cultural institutions create AI-powered conversational experiences. The company now works with institutions across 18 countries, building experiences that allow visitors to engage with art, history, and culture through natural conversation.

Shaping AI in service of curiosity

Carré often describes Ask Mona’s mission in simple terms.

“We leverage artificial intelligence at the service of curiosity.”

The idea emerged from a challenge she saw repeatedly in cultural institutions. Visitors arrive with different backgrounds, interests, languages, and levels of knowledge. Yet museums traditionally have limited ways to adapt to those differences.

“You arrive in a museum and you have the same content everywhere,” Carré says. “But everyone wants to learn something different.”

Conversation changes that.

Rather than following a predefined path, visitors can ask the questions that matter to them. A child may focus on one detail. An art historian on another. A tourist may simply want context.vThe experience becomes personal rather than prescribed.

“We wanted people to be able to ask any question they have in their own language and with their own curiosity.”

Everything changed with generative AI

The vision behind Ask Mona came long before the technology could fully support it.

In the company’s early days, creating conversational experiences required anticipating every possible question a visitor might ask. Every interaction had to be designed in advance.

“If I take the example of the Mona Lisa, I had to think of all the questions people could ask themselves in front of the artwork,” Carré says. “That’s something very hard to do.”

Generative AI changed the equation.

“When we saw those tools emerge, we felt it was finally the right time to deliver the vision we had from the beginning.”

Today, visitors can have genuine conversations with cultural content while still relying on the expertise of the institution itself. Every interaction remains grounded in museum knowledge, but adapts dynamically to the visitor’s interests.

“It’s always the knowledge from the museum,” Carré says. “But delivered in a different way because it depends on the questions visitors ask.”

A bridge between technology and culture

Carré describes Ask Mona as a bridge. On one side is frontier AI technology. On the other is the deep expertise held by museums and cultural institutions.

“We’re embedding amazing technology,” she says. “But we’re also adding a layer that includes identity, knowledge, and culture.”

Internally, Ask Mona refers to this framework as IKC. Each experience is built around three elements: identity, knowledge, and culture. An artwork needs a voice. Historical knowledge needs context. Cultural references need to feel authentic to local audiences.

Sometimes, Carré says, the work feels closer to storytelling than software development.

“It’s almost like writing a novel. Every project is a new character.”

Whether the speaker is a historical figure, a statue, or an artwork, every interaction requires careful consideration of voice, context, and cultural sensitivity.

Creating experiences that were previously impossible

One of Ask Mona’s best-known projects lives in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles.

At the Palace of Versailles, visitors can hold conversations with statues throughout the gardens. The exchange might begin with a playful question—Are you cold standing in water all day?—before moving into discussions of history, mythology, or architecture.

For Carré, the significance isn’t the novelty. It’s the scale.

The result isn’t simply a new interface for information. It’s a different model for learning.

Traditionally, museums have faced a difficult tradeoff. The most personalized experience would be a dedicated guide for every visitor. But that’s impossible to deliver at scale.

AI changes the economics.

Every visitor can now ask unlimited questions, in their own language, at their own pace.

The future of learning

One of Carré’s favorite memories happened entirely by chance.

While traveling during a summer holiday, she overheard a family discussing their recent visit to Versailles. A mother asked her son what he had enjoyed most. His answer wasn’t the palace or the gardens.

“It was incredible to talk with the AI.”

The child immediately followed with another question: would the other museums they visited that summer have the same experience?

“I was super happy about that,” Carré says.

Moments like these reinforce her belief that AI can fundamentally reshape how people learn and discover. The goal isn’t to replace curators, educators, or cultural institutions. It’s to make their knowledge more accessible, more personal, and more responsive to the questions people actually want to ask.

What excites her most isn’t a specific feature or product announcement. It’s the unknown.

“We don’t know yet everything we can do with it,” she says. “Every day we discover new use cases, new experiences, and new ways to help people learn.”

For Carré, that’s the real opportunity. Not replacing culture with technology. Helping more people engage with it.

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