Art Galleries Are Quietly Embracing A.I. But Most Have No Guardrails in Place

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into business operations across industries, the fact that galleries are incorporating it in their operations, officially or not, has become impossible to ignore. Marc Spiegler’s Art Business Academy even created an entire course around the subject, “A.I. & the Art Market,” designed and moderated by Spiegler alongside four top experts—Alan Lau, Aimée Scala, Tim Schneider and Ty Ahmad-Taylor. And First Thursday’s 2026 A.I. in Galleries Report confirms what many already suspected: A.I. adoption among galleries is widespread, ungoverned and accelerating.

Of the 103 gallery professionals surveyed, 84 percent are using A.I., and four in ten report using it regularly. Yet 63 percent of respondents further stated they have received no guidance or guardrails from management, and only 8 percent of galleries have introduced internal policies related to artificial intelligence use—policies already standard in many other corporate environments. More concerning is the fact that 80 percent of those surveyed are accessing these tools using personal accounts, which suggests that they may be inadvertently sharing sensitive information—including pricing and client data—without the gallery’s knowledge.

“It’s been over three years since the public release of ChatGPT, and in that time we’ve heard relatively little about how A.I. is being used in the gallery sector,” First Thursday founder Callum Hale-Thomson told Observer. “Our report shows that this silence shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of activity. Staff at nearly every gallery we surveyed now use A.I. in their day-to-day operations, but almost always with little oversight or guidance from leadership.”

That alone, he said, should be a wake-up call for gallery owners. “Without proper implementation, sensitive gallery and collector data can be used for A.I. model training, shared with third parties or leaked. In an industry built on discretion and trust, the gap between how widely A.I. 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 galleries’ client management—around the time ChatGPT launched in 2022. In every conversation with dealers and staff, he asked whether they had ever considered using A.I. in their day-to-day work. The answer was consistently no. Two years later, ChatGPT began appearing on salespeople’s phones and Gemini was co-writing gallery emails, yet nobody in the industry seemed to be seriously questioning A.I.’s impact on the commercial art world—except in relation to A.I.-generated art, copyright and plagiarism.

According to the survey, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the industry standard, with nine out of ten respondents reportedly using it. Google Gemini is the second most popular artificial intelligence tool, with Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity coming in third and fourth. Most gallery professionals are using A.I. to write, with 78 percent of survey takers using it for creating and polishing press releases, artist biographies and collector emails. Yet the single most common use of A.I. in the art world turns out to be translation—between languages, of course, but also as a way to transmute tone, emotional nuance and phrasing. On the operational side, galleries are using A.I. for research, account management and administration (33 percent) and collector research (30 percent). Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite the art world being an industry that runs on visuals, only around a quarter report using image-generation tools such as 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 don’t maintain in an easily integrated form.

The main driver of adoption is less about experimentation than about potentially falling behind others already using A.I. to optimize workflows. Time pressure is a primary factor. The majority of respondents confirmed that running their businesses has become more operationally complex over the past two years, as they try to keep pace with a relentlessly fast, globally scaled, always-expanding industry while keeping headcounts the same. Galleries have traditionally relied on unpaid (or underpaid) interns, but more and more, A.I. is taking on the time-consuming administrative work they might have handled.

Larger galleries feel those pressures most acutely, with 44 percent of galleries with 11 or more employees acknowledging that pressure and the challenges of formally integrating A.I. support into company governance. Smaller and mid-sized galleries have been more flexible in their adoption of artificial intelligence, with many, if not most, simply improvising (particularly when they don’t have dedicated operations or technology staff).

Gallery professionals at all levels share one concern, however, and it’s not the potential for lost jobs, ethical quandaries or a possible client backlash. The top-ranked area of concern, according to the report, is accuracy. Two-thirds of respondents said they worry about A.I. producing incorrect information about artists or artworks.

Yet as the survey highlights, familiarity breeds confidence, and across every concern measured, regular users scored significantly lower than non-users. Despite the concerns, most gallery professionals see A.I. adoption as inevitable and feel optimistic about its capabilities, with 62 percent agreeing that the art world is behind on technology adoption. 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 in ten even expressed excitement. What’s missing, according to 55 percent of those surveyed, is A.I. tools purpose-built for the art world rather than generic consumer platforms. Over half said they would invest in A.I. tools if they could see a clear return.

More art market insights

• Sotheby’s Evelyn Lin On Asia’s Maturing Market, Young Collectors and the New Rules of the Hong Kong Sale

• Are Hong Kong and Mainland China Poised for an Art Market Rebound?

• Inside the Art Marketplace, Elliot Safra’s Bid to Make Private Sales More Efficient

• What Sotheby’s Buyer’s Premium Increase Reveals About the Major Houses’ Evolving Commercial Strategies

• Artificial Intelligence Is Quietly Rewriting the Rules of Art Valuation