How Ask Mona plans to revolutionise Middle East's museum industry with generative AI

Generation Start-up: French company uses technology to curate personalised learning experiences for museums, heritage sites and cultural organisations

Ask Mona is currently raising funds to expand its geographical footprint. Photo: Ask Mona

Marion Carre calls herself an accidental entrepreneur.

In 2017, when she launched her first business, she was a 21-year-old student who wanted to become a journalist.

Today, she is an artist, an educationist and a businesswoman, as well as an expert evaluator at the European Commission.

Her leap of faith to co-found Ask Mona – the first French generative artificial intelligence-driven platform that curates learning experiences for museum, monuments and heritage sites – has paid off handsomely.

The web-based platform, which also works with historical and cultural organisations, was launched as a chatbot in 2017.

However, with the rapid development of the technology, Ask Mona has evolved over the years into a generative AI venture that helps some of the world’s most prestigious museums to disseminate information about themselves, as well as historical artefacts and artworks they exhibit for their global audiences.

Marion Carre co-founded Ask Mona in 2017. Photo: Aurelie Lamachere

“We're building the possibility for each person to have a different learning experience in the places where they learn, and museums are one of them,” Ms Carre says.

“What we are building in museums is an AI companion that is there to answer your questions, your very specific questions about an artwork and history characters, and whatever else you're discovering in that place.”

Its 150 clients include French national art museum The Louvre, one of the most famous museums in the world, Orsay, which houses French art and the Centre Pompidou, the complex that is home to the French Public Information Library, as well as Musee National d'Art Moderne, the largest museum for modern art in Europe.

Roma Colosseum in Italy, Grand Palais in Paris, Chillon castle in Switzerland and French national monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe, Cite de Carcassone and Mont Saint-Michel also use Ask Mona’s generative AI platform as part of their tools to improve the experience of millions of visitors every year.

The start-up also works with organisations such as the Louis Vuitton Foundation.

It all started when Ms Carre was doing a media report on the history of Paris as part of her journalism degree from the school of communication at Sorbonne University.

“It made me discover entrepreneurship, something I didn't consider doing before because my parents worked for the state, and with really public-orientated minds, I would say my family and I, we never considered creative businesses,” Ms Marion says.

“I had the kind of image that entrepreneurship was for old men out of business schools and that wasn't my track at all.”

However, her interaction with young entrepreneurs during the project inspired her to launch Ask Mona with co-founder Valentin Schmite.

While the experience was “harsh”, it was also “the best way to learn”, and Ms Carre says she tells young entrepreneurs today that “the only way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to be an entrepreneur”.

Like every start-up, Ask Mona faced initial hurdles, including gaining the trust of decision makers in the museum world.

There were a few who were “not open about it”. However, there were those who were “mindful about the fact that they need to be relevant for the young generation to want them to come to their places”, she says.

The first movers’ advantage in an industry that had not been disrupted in ages and the uniqueness of the Ask Mona model has helped it to expand into eight markets: France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada and the US.

The emergence of generative AI, propelled to the forefront by OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2023, has hastened its expansion. It is a programme that comes up with humanlike responses to prompts in seconds, based on information publicly available on the internet.

Thanks to its adoption across different sectors, the size of the generative AI market is expected to surge to $1.3 trillion by 2032, from $40 billion in 2022, at a compound annual growth rate of 42 per cent, a report by Bloomberg Intelligence last year found.

Growth is being driven by training infrastructure in the near-term and gradually shifting to inference devices for large language models (LLMs), digital advertisements, specialised software and services in the medium to long term, it found.

Ask Mona’s Van Gogh magnets are sold at various museums in eight countries. Photo: Ask Mona

Middle East plans

Ask Mona – derived from Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, one of the most recognisable artworks in the world and a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance – has now set sights on further expanding its geographical footprint and export its AI learning model to culturally diverse markets.

The Middle East, which was home to ancient civilisations and is the birthplace of three major religions in the world – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – is a natural target for Ask Mona’s expansion, says Ms Carre.

The company intends to “democratise access to knowledge” and create individual learning experiences for museum-goers in the region as it did in Europe.

The company has broken the “one-size-fits-all learning experience” through the integration of generative AI into the process of disseminating information, she adds.

Ask Mona plans to introduce its personalised assistance – which has helped visitors “go a step further” in Europe – to museums, monuments and cultural and historical organisations in the Middle East.

“We see lots of cultural richness and [potential for] cultural doors to open, with our proposition of having a personalised learning experience while you're in these museums, and that's the main reason why we want to reach out to these organisations,” Ms Carre says.

“We're already having conversations.”

Ask Mona plans to launch its first project on the ground in the Middle East as soon as possible.

“People then feel confident that you already worked with the first organisation [in the region]. So, that's the first thing we trying to do.”

Valentin Schmite, co-founder of Ask Mona. Photo: Ask Mona

Funding for growth

Ask Mona, which was launched with a grant from the French Ministry of Culture, has so far raised €2 million ($2.27 million) in financing largely from BPI France, a French investment and development bank.

The company is currently in talks with investors to raise another €4 million from its latest financing round, which it will partly use to diversify its business into the education sector.

“We're raising funds to support our international expansion and also support the expansion of our projects in the knowledge transfer market,” Ms Carre says.

Ask Mona plans to the close the funding round this fall and is open to raising money from investors in the Middle East.

“When we're raising funds, what we're looking for is, of course, money but what is even more important is knowledge and expertise,” she says.

It is important for the company to raise funding from investors in the location where it wants expand to as that is the “best way to approach a market”, Ms Carre says.

“I think investors from the Middle East can be very helpful” and the company is keen to tap into their expertise, she adds.

The company's revenue model works by charging fees from clients for its services and selling magnets at souvenir shops in museums and heritage sites.

Ask Mona creates a knowledge base around a particular character in history, a place or an artwork and links that with a QR code on a magnet. Users can scan that code and ask any questions about the subject, which are answered through the company’s generative AI model, she explains.

Ask Mona uses generative AI to disseminate information and knowledge. Photo: Ask Mona

Q&A with Ask Mona chief executive and co-founder Marion Carre

Who is your role model and what is your mantra for success?

Whatever you do, make the most impact. Impact is the way I measure success.

In terms of role models, I would say that I have numerous from very different niche industries and areas of expertise. For example, I have world leaders, historians, some of them are women politicians, some are artists. All of them bring something to me, to see the world in a specific way.

Are you a risk-taker or a cautious entrepreneur?

By default, you are a risky person if you are an entrepreneur because if you are not, you would be doing something else, another job. In that pool of risky people, I would say that I am the cautious one.

I also really listen to my intuitions as sometimes, as an entrepreneur, you have to make decisions in imperfect situations, when you lack data for instance. I try to do decision-making in a cautious way when possible.

What successful start-up do you wish you had started?

I do not have a specific name. Most of the time we think about the big technology companies as a thing to identify. But there are many under-the-radar companies that have really changed the way in which their respective industry operates.

I listen to stories and learn from those under-the-radar entrepreneurs, rather than from the big gurus of technology. Everybody has something to teach you in this industry.

Where do you see the company five years from now?

So, five years from now, I want us to be the company that helps people get the right learning experience across industries. It can be culture but also education at a global scale.

What new skills have you learnt in launching Ask Mona?

There are soft skills that you learn, rely on when you are an entrepreneur. There has to be curiosity and also intuitiveness, and that is really my way of operating – to try to have a sense of what is happening.

I think it is really important to be resilient because when you are doing a start-up, there are happy moments and also, sometimes, complete despair. Resilience is important to be able to keep your mind focused, to take the right decisions, even if things are tough.

Also, how to have an impact on your ecosystem.

What is one quality entrepreneurs should have?

I will be repetitive and say it is resilience. It is really about it and around it but that does not mean stubbornness. It means being open and trying to stay focused, otherwise, it will not work, and it will be difficult to have the balance and move your ship in the right direction.

COMPANY PROFILE

Company: Ask Mona

Started: 2017

Founders: Marion Carre, Valentin Schmite

Based: Paris

Industry: EdTech, Generative AI

Funding size: €2.5 million

Investors: BPIFrance