A.I. tour guide can plug the gift shop mid-tour, its maker tells museums

A Washington state technology company told museum staff at an American Alliance of Museums online showcase Tuesday that its artificial intelligence tour guide can pitch gift shop merchandise while describing artwork to a visitor.

“If you configure it to do so to the visitor while they’re talking, it will talk about the picture and then say, oh, by the way, a copy of this is available in the gift shop,” said Ehab Deraz, founder and CEO of World Retina.

Deraz said the app, Guida, can offer “the print, the book, the replica from the shop” when a visitor lingers on a painting. Museums can hold the offer until the visitor shows more interest, such as listening to the entire audio.

“The tour itself becomes a revenue channel,” he said.

Urgent Matter previously reported that, with budgets tightening and costs climbing, museums have said buying holiday gifts from their shops has become a lifeline.

World Retina’s website promotes “A.I.-driven recommendations for gift shop items and event promotions.” Deraz said the app can also carry promotions for events, exhibitions and memberships— and link objects to ticket and donation pages.

Pricing starts “from $500 a month for small museums with the core features,” he said.

Deraz did not disclose any museum using Guida during the session.

Apple’s App Store lists World Retina as the seller of a Bellevue Arts Museum app, billed as “Your personal A.I. guide to Bellevue Art Museum.” The listing advertises “AI audio guides in 14 languages,” camera recognition of exhibits, indoor maps and scavenger hunts.

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The Bellevue Arts Museum agreed in October 2025 to sell its Steven Holl-designed building in downtown Bellevue to KidsQuest Children’s Museum, the two organizations said in a joint press release at the time.

The museum said in a press release Thursday that it sold its Bellevue Way building earlier this year and moved its offices to Bellevue College on September 18.

“We couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with Bellevue College as we reinvent what our nonprofit organization will become outside of our former museum walls,” Adam Harrison, president of the museum’s board, said in the release.

The release says the organization will expand its campus space in 2027 and continue producing the Bellevue Arts Fair.

The 2025 release, which quoted Shelly Crocker as “BAM Receiver,” said the building sale would allow the museum “to pay all of its creditors in full and reconstitute a board for the surviving nonprofit organization.”

Urgent Matter downloaded the app Friday. Its main screen, titled “Bellevue Art Museum,” shows a photo of the museum’s former Bellevue Way building above buttons to start a tour and activities.

The app displayed banners reading “The tour can start when you are at Bellevue Art Museum” and “Activities can start when you are at Bellevue Art Museum.”

World Retina, which lists a Spokane mailing address, says on its website it is a professional member of AAM. Urgent Matter reviewed recordings of three of the four showcase sessions.

Deraz said he has worked more than 25 years at major U.S. technology companies and holds over 25 U.S. patents. He said museum labels, audio guides, and flyers are usually written in one or two languages.

“And I would say, if a visitor can’t read the label, the artwork stays silent,” he said.

In a live demonstration on his phone, Deraz pointed the app at objects in a demo museum and picked from a menu of guide personas, including a “Curious Explorer” and a children’s guide called the “Playful Pal.” Museums can write their own.

He switched the narration to Spanish and back. When he told the Playful Pal “I’m hungry,” it answered: “Pop, zoom over to the cafe to grab a yummy treat. It is located to the left of the entrance.”

Museum staff run the guide from a web portal. Adding an object takes five to seven photos and “less than 30 seconds,” Deraz said. Then it takes about two minutes for the system to build a model.

Curators enter the descriptions the guide draws on. In “companion mode,” the guide holds a conversation from that material and adjusts the wording as it goes. With the mode off, it reads the curator’s text as written.

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Deraz said every object a visitor stops at produces data on “what people explore, skip, how long they stay and which language they speak.”

“All that is available so they can plan programming and marketing around real visitors,” he said.

The dashboard he showed tracked visits and visitors, including how long they stayed and which languages they used in the app and audio.

Guida’s Apple App Store listing, in privacy disclosures supplied by the developer, lists precise and coarse location, photos or videos, audio data and product interaction data as collected but not linked to a user’s identity. Its Google Play listing says the app does not share data with third parties.

“At its core is our museum-specific A.I. that we developed in-house. And of course, we connect to many of today’s leading frontier models,” Deraz said.

He did not say which outside models Guida uses. He said the platform runs on the company’s “own dedicated GPUs and servers.”

Asked during the question period whether information museums submit is used to build the A.I.’s knowledge, he said no.

“It is your information. You keep it. It is yours. This is in our agreement,” he said.

When asked how the app handles limited bandwidth, he said much depends on Wi-Fi. He said a version that runs locally on the phone would be ready in “a few months.”

“My advice is if you want to move to A.I., invest in your Wi-Fi. That is part of moving and modernizing your museums,” he said.

Asked how the app protects scientific accuracy, Deraz pointed to the scripted setting, which prevents visitors from asking open questions of the guide.

“It just reads what is there,” he said.

The next session was led by Luci, a Chicago experience design firm. Its chief creative officer, Matthew McNerney, presented “Edges, Borders, & Frames: Museum Content in a TikTok World,” mostly through a pre-recorded video.

“I can’t tell you how many times a month an RFP will come across my desk specifically asking for a new piece of technology, as if it will magically lure visitors into the galleries,” McNerney said. “Only to find a few years later, it can be a real headache.”

He cited the generation effect, in which “people remember far better when they generate an answer themselves than when it is handed to them.” He also cited the Google effect, which researchers named in 2011.

“When information is easy to look up, your brain stops bothering to keep it,” McNerney said. “And now A.I. lets us summon anything on demand.”

He then pointed to two new projects he said had “broken through in unexpected ways.” He said “The First Salute,” at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, was “so cinematic that it feels more Jerry Bruckheimer than Ken Burns.”

He said a new digital companion at the MIT Museum lets visitors “walk the galleries and get more personalized, relevant feedback.”

“And both are 100% A.I.,” McNerney said. “It’s wild.”

Lorem Ipsum, the studio behind “The First Salute,” says on its website that the exhibition’s main films used “a hybrid approach that combines traditional filmmaking, computer-generated imagery, and generative A.I. tools.”

MIT Museum staff were scheduled to present a multilingual gallery guide powered by artificial intelligence, one of several A.I. projects the museum is testing, at the MCN 2026 conference Thursday, the conference program shows.

During the question period, an attendee asked what museums with exhibit budgets under $50,000 a year can do. McNerney described a Tenement Museum installation he worked on at a previous firm, about women who sewed in Chinatown sweatshops.

He said his team bought iPhone-sized projectors on Amazon for about $400 apiece, mounted them under a sewing machine and wired the machine so a visitor’s bare-handed touch started a first-person story projected onto the desk.

“And it was done for like $60,000,” he said. “And it’s lasted for years.”

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