Mr Renschler, what is Musa Guide all about, and what solutions do you offer museums and exhibition venues?

A good guided tour responds to its visitors. We believe every museum can offer this to everyone without having to launch a major project. Musa Guide turns existing content into an audio guide or a family discovery trail on visitors' smartphones, both indoors and outdoors.

The museum decides what stories to tell and can update the content itself at any time. If desired, AI can answer questions in the visitor's own language, based on verified content.

Musa Guide has already been used in seven institutions across three continents, with annual visitor numbers ranging from 60,000 to 600,000.

Which products and applications will you be presenting at MUTEC 2026, and what can visitors discover or try out at your stand?

We will be giving a presentation on each day of the fair. On 5 November at 11:30 a.m., we will be speaking in the Pitch Area about “Learning from Visitors: How AI Brings Museums Closer to Their Audiences”. On 6 November at 1:30 p.m., our presentation in the Exhibitor Forum will explore “The Curatorial Voice in the Age of AI”.

We will share findings from our visitor survey and experiences from our projects. At our stand, F15, we will showcase what we are currently working on and invite visitors to try out our guides on their own smartphones.

A new development this year is the MUTEC Guide, which we have created together with Leipziger Messe. It allows visitors to plan their visit and navigate the fair on site.

What specific benefits will the application offer MUTEC visitors during their visit?

We designed the guide for two situations: planning ahead and finding your way around during the event.

The interactive hall map shows all exhibitor stands, and the programme for every presentation area is included. Anyone looking for something specific can simply ask the guide a question and receive recommendations for relevant exhibitors and presentations.

Visitors can save anything they do not want to miss to a personal favourites list, making it immediately accessible during the fair.

The guide is available in seven languages, including Polish and Chinese, so international visitors can use it too.

What would you like to test for the first time with this joint project at MUTEC, and what insights do you hope to gain for the further development of your product?

MUTEC is the first trade fair where our guide will be used.

Trade fairs can quickly become overwhelming. There are numerous stands, and presentations take place simultaneously on several stages. Another new aspect for us is that there is no fixed route. In museums, we usually guide visitors through a narrative, whereas at a trade fair, everyone explores independently.

We want to find out whether the guide helps people discover what is most relevant to them amid this wealth of options. We are also interested in how much a trade fair can learn from visitor behavior to improve the experience in the future.

How do you think digital technologies and AI are changing the visitor experience?

AI allows visitors to ask questions at the very moment their curiosity is sparked.

According to our survey conducted this spring, around one third of adult museum visitors had used an AI tool such as ChatGPT to ask questions about museum content during the previous twelve months. Most of them did so while actually visiting a museum.

In the long term, AI may also change how we see ourselves as human beings. For a long time, we have defined ourselves through our intellect. From an evolutionary perspective, however, logical reasoning is relatively recent, so it should hardly surprise us that machines can perform it well.

The more AI takes over these tasks, the clearer it becomes what else defines us.

When accurate answers are available everywhere, what matters even more is whom we trust to select what is important and tell the story well. Museums have always done exactly that.

Getting the facts right is one thing. Choosing the right facts is another.

Which Musa Guide project are you particularly proud of, and why?

We are especially proud of projects that presented linguistic challenges and where we did not know how people would respond, such as those in Hong Kong or Guatemala.

The Museo Miraflores in Guatemala City welcomes visitors from all over the world, from China to Europe. With the guide, they can explore the history of the Maya in greater depth in their own language, while the museum has gained a new source of revenue.

This project won first place in the Guest Journey category at the blooloop Innovation Awards 2025.

It is also rewarding to see how much the museum team has learned from visitors' questions since then and how they have independently expanded the guide with new content.

We are equally proud of our projects in German-speaking countries, including the audio guide developed for the Max Pechstein Foundation's exhibition at Lentos in Linz and the guide at Lokschuppen Rosenheim.

At Lokschuppen, half of the visitors using the guide spent more than 80 minutes exploring the exhibition, around four times as long as a typical exhibition visit.

What are you most looking forward to at MUTEC 2026?

Above all, the conversations – with colleagues from museums as well as with other exhibitors.

And we are looking forward to walking through the hall ourselves and meeting people who are using the MUTEC Guide.