Driving the digital transformation of visitor experience

"There are 75,000 museums globally with over 1 billion visitors per year (AAM, 2018). The average visitor spends £20 per visit on ticketing, retail, audio guides and donations. However, it is a hugely inefficient market in which museums are making only £9bn coming predominantly from retail and ticketing (93% of visitor-generated revenue); with donations at 5%; and audio guides just 2% in spite of the fact that providing engaging, educational experiences is a key aim for museums globally _(__analysis from annual reports of 25 of the world's most visited museums 2017/18)._ The main barrier for museums to embrace technology are high costs of tailor-made digital solutions, lack of staff time and digital expertise. As museums are under increasing financial pressures, technology solutions are fundamental to the sector's future success.

Smartify can answer this need by bringing to the market a highly scalable and cost-efficient product based on disruptive technologies and team's expertise in the fields of art digitisation, digital content management and award-winning user experience design.

Smartify will deliver a full-stack SaaS digital platform that will include digitalisation and publishing capacity; commercial transactions and sales; advanced audience data capturing and AI targeted marketing; and an elegant AR end-user experience for connecting with works of fine art. The objective is to allow British and global institutions to leverage the existing rich cultural capital and monetise it via digital platforms using advanced audience data and AI targeted marketing coupled with an elegant end-user experience for connecting with works of fine art.

The project is innovative because it will use cutting edge technologies to enable a step-change in the digital capacity and long-term financial resilience of museums in the UK and globally. At the same time Smartify will provide the hundreds of millions of museums' visitors globally with a tool to discover and engage with art. If you consider what Spotify has achieved for music, Smartify will deliver the equivalent B2B2C software platform for art."