As artificial intelligence is increasingly integrated into business operations across industries, the fact that galleries are incorporating it into their operations, formally or not, has become impossible to ignore. Marc SpieglerThe Art Business Academy even created an entire course around the topic, “AI & the Art Market,” designed and moderated by Spiegler along with four top experts—Alan Lau, Aimée Scala, Tim Schneider AND You Ahmad-Taylor. AND First ThursdayThe 2026 Artificial Intelligence in Galleries Report confirms what many already suspected: AI adoption among galleries is widespread, ungoverned, and growing.
Of the 103 gallery professionals surveyed, 84 percent use AI and four in ten report using it regularly. However, 63 percent of respondents further stated that they have received no guidance or guidance from management, and only 8 percent of galleries have introduced internal policies regarding the use of artificial intelligence – policies now standard in many other corporate environments. More concerning is the fact that 80 percent of respondents are accessing these tools using personal accounts, which suggests they may be inadvertently sharing sensitive information—including pricing and customer data—without the gallery’s knowledge.
“It’s been more than three years since ChatGPT went public, and in that time we’ve heard relatively little about how AI is being used in the gallery sector,” the First Thursday founder. Callum Hale-Thomson said the Observer. “Our report shows that this silence should not be confused with a lack of activity. Staff at nearly every gallery we surveyed now use AI in their day-to-day operations, but almost always with little oversight or direction from management.”
That alone, he said, should be a wake-up call to gallery owners. “Without proper implementation, sensitive gallery and collector data can be used for AI model training, shared with third parties, or disclosed. In an industry built on discretion and trust, the gap between how widely AI is being used and how little governance surrounds it should concern everyone.”
Hale-Thomson began interviewing galleries to build First Thursday—a platform for optimizing gallery client management—around the time ChatGPT launched in 2022. In every conversation with dealers and staff, he asked if they had ever considered using AI in their day-to-day work. The answer was consistently no. Two years later, ChatGPT started appearing on salespeople’s phones and Gemini was co-writing gallery emails, yet no one in the industry seemed to seriously question the impact of AI on the commercial art world – except in relation to AI-generated art, copyright and plagiarism.
According to the survey, OpenAIChatGPT is the industry standard, with nine out of ten respondents said to use it. Google Gemini is the second most popular AI tool, with AnthropogenicClaude and Perplexity come in third and fourth. Most gallery professionals are using AI for writing, with 78 percent of respondents using it to create and polish press releases, artist bios, and collector emails. However, the single most common use of AI in the art world turns out to be translation—between languages, of course, but also as a way to convey tone, emotional nuance, and expression. On the operational side, galleries use AI for research, account management and administration (33 percent) and collector research (30 percent). Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite the art world being a visual industry, only about a quarter report using image generation tools like DALL-E and Midjourney. CRM and contact management is the least common use case at just 12 percent, likely because it requires direct integration with existing databases, which many galleries do not maintain in an easily integrated form.
The main driver of adoption has less to do with experimentation than with potentially falling behind others already using AI to optimize workflows. Time pressure is a major factor. Most respondents confirmed that running their businesses has become more operationally complicated over the past two years as they struggle to keep pace with a relentless, globally scaled, ever-expanding industry while keeping headcount the same. Galleries have traditionally relied on unpaid (or underpaid) interns, but increasingly, AI is taking over the time-consuming administrative work they might otherwise have handled.
Larger galleries feel those pressures more acutely, with 44 percent of galleries with 11 or more employees acknowledging that pressure and the challenges of formally integrating AI support into company governance. Smaller and medium-sized galleries have been more flexible in their adoption of AI, with many, if not most, simply improvising (especially when they don’t have dedicated operations or technology staff).
However, gallery professionals at all levels share one concern, and it’s not the potential for lost work, ethical issues or a potential client backlash. The top-ranked area of concern, according to the report, is accuracy. Two-thirds of respondents said they worry about AI producing inaccurate information about artists or artwork.
However, as the survey points out, familiarity breeds trust, and on every concern measured, regular users scored significantly lower than non-users. Despite concerns, most gallery professionals see the adoption of AI as inevitable and feel optimistic about its capabilities, with 62 percent agreeing that the art world is lagging behind in adopting the technology. There are more opportunities than threats, most said, and being able to streamline administrative and operational processes would free up time to spend with artists and buyers. Four out of ten even expressed emotion. What’s missing, according to 55 percent of respondents, are AI tools purpose-built for the art world rather than general consumer platforms. Over half said they would invest in AI tools if they could see a clear return.
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