Five years isn’t a long time. Ask anyone who works in arts and culture and they’ll tell you it’s roughly the span of a strategic plan, a building project or a leadership tenure.

And yet, when we speak to institutions about what visitor experience will look like in 2031, the honest answer more often than not is that they haven’t quite finalised their thinking yet.

That’s completely understandable. It can be hard to think about what’s coming next when you’re managing the unrelenting day-to-day demands of running a museum, gallery or cultural destination. Somehow the present is always more urgent than the future.

“The institutions positioning themselves well for 2031 are not necessarily the ones with the biggest technology budgets.”

The future has a way of arriving anyway…

At Smartify, we work with hundreds of institutions around the world: from national museums to local galleries, and heritage sites to contemporary art spaces. We see not just what individual institutions are doing, but what the patterns look like across the sector. Where the leaders are pulling ahead. Where the gaps are widening. What visitors are starting to expect that institutions haven’t yet caught up with.

What we see is that the institutions positioning themselves well for 2031 are not necessarily the ones with the biggest technology budgets. They’re the ones that have got the fundamentals right: clarity of purpose, genuine understanding of their visitors, and a leadership culture that treats visitor experience as the key product.

Technology matters. (Of course it does – it's what we do!) But the best digital experience in the world cannot compensate for a visitor who feels unwelcome, confused, or unseen the moment they walk through the door.

<!-- CTA block -->

A talking point on the global stage for innovation and culture

On 27 May, Smartify CEO Thanos Kokkiniotis will chair Experience 2031, organised by Metavallon VC as part of the Panathēnea Festival.

Joining him at the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation in Athens are four leaders grappling with what the future looks like:

• Kati Price (V&A Museum) has spent years developing visitor experience standards across one of the world's most complex and beloved cultural institutions — now in the middle of a major multi-site expansion. Her insight is that the most impactful changes are often the least glamorous.

• Elly Andriopoulou (SNFCC) leads the digitalisation work at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center that most visitors never see: the analytics, feedback systems and operational data infrastructure that shape everything from programming to pricing.

• Sakis Tanimanidis (Paradox Museum / Enthoosia) built his own experiential museum franchise across 15 countries after deciding he could do it better. He brings a commercial sharpness about visitor delight that the publicly funded sector often struggles to match — and could learn from.

• Epaminondas Christophilopoulos (MOMus / UNESCO Chair on Futures Research) has spent over a decade studying what organisations systematically fail to see coming. His particular interest: the practical fundamentals that institutions overlook in their pursuit of innovation.

Together, the panel will work through four themes – institutional purpose, visitor intelligence, experience design, and the five-year horizon – that we think define where the sector is heading.

We’ll be sharing reflections from the panel after the event. But the central question it raises doesn’t need to wait for Athens.

Are the decisions your institution is making today – about technology, standards, data, culture, leadership – preparing you for what’s to come.

Five years from now, the visitors walking through your doors will have expectations shaped by every great experience they’ve had in the years between now and then. The institutions that got the foundations right may very well be the ones they choose to return to.