At a glance

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi worked with Ask Mona to launch a conversational AI experience that lets visitors talk with its artworks. Available in English and Hindi, voice-first, the experience invites visitors into the museum's Tyeb Mehta retrospective, letting them ask their own questions and go deeper into the work of one of India's foremost modern painters.
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The context

Founded in 2010 by collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar and supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation, KNMA is one of South Asia's first private museums dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Its collection holds more than ten thousand works, with a strong focus on the trajectories of twentieth-century Indian art and on experimental contemporary practice.
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The museum has long been defined by an ambition to open art to the widest possible audience, in a country where museum-going is not yet a deeply rooted habit. That ambition is entering a new phase: KNMA is preparing a vast new campus near Delhi, set to become one of the most significant cultural destinations in the Asia-Pacific region. Now led by Manuel Rabaté, formerly of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the museum is thinking carefully about how technology can deepen the way visitors engage with its collection.
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KNMA approached the conversational AI experience as a first, focused step. The logic was clear: start lean, validate the impact on real audiences, then scale on the basis of results. The Tyeb Mehta retrospective offered a natural setting to begin.
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The solution

Ask Mona designed a conversational agent that let visitors ask questions about the works and receive answers in natural language. The experience is voice-first, so visitors can speak their questions aloud or type them, and it runs as a full-page web experience reachable from a visitor's own phone.
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It speaks both English and Hindi, a deliberate choice for a museum whose audiences move between the two. The knowledge base was built from KNMA's own carefully prepared content, so that each answer stays grounded in what the museum wants to say about its works.
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Rather than reading a label, a visitor can ask what they actually want to know and follow their own curiosity through the exhibition.
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Why this approach

The experience was built to prove a point rather than to cover everything at once. By focusing on a single exhibition, KNMA could measure how audiences actually use conversational AI, how much they engage and what they ask, before committing to a larger deployment. The experience was designed to scale on demand: more works and an extra language can be added during the engagement as needs grow.
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This matters because the longer-term horizon is significant. A strong first result lays the groundwork for the museum's future campus, where conversational AI could accompany visitors across a far larger collection.
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The collaboration

The project kicked off in April 2026 and went live within roughly a month, in step with the Tyeb Mehta retrospective. Working directly with the museum's project and marketing leads, Ask Mona handled the build, the testing and the training, with particular attention to helping the museum drive real usage through signage and communication around the experience. This project brings conversational AI to a museum that has made wide access part of its mission and lets visitors engage with the Tyeb Mehta retrospective on their own terms.

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