What could your team achieve with an AI co-investment?
Galleries, libraries, archives and museums are sitting on incredible assets. Deep collections, rich metadata, decades of specialist knowledge, millions of interactions with the public. AI is increasingly able to do useful things with all of it.
We launched our AI co-fund programme to help charities test whether AI could make a meaningful difference to how they work. We've since partnered with organisations on proof of concept projects ranging from AI-assisted query triage to drafting tools for clinical and humanitarian communications.
The model is simple: we co-invest up to £15,000 through our Employee Ownership Trust Innovation Fund, covering half the cost of a focused proof of concept that we scope, build and measure together.
Now we're opening the programme up to the GLAM sector.
The challenges we hear
We've been working with cultural organisations for years and the same frustrations come up again and again. Collections that are hard to search. Knowledge trapped in systems that don't connect. Teams doing manual work that leaves no time for the things that matter most. Audiences who never find what's there because the routes aren't intuitive enough.
These are exactly the kinds of challenges AI can help with. We've already seen it in our own work. We've helped cultural organisations use AI to let visitors explore collections through natural language rather than rigid keyword searches. We've prototyped new approaches to discovery that surface unexpected connections between objects, stories and people. We've built tools that automatically convert thousands of legacy documents into accessible formats, integrated directly into the CMS.
Across the wider sector, organisations are exploring AI for everything from enriching metadata and cataloguing at scale to multilingual accessibility and conservation monitoring. The most valuable work has a common thread: it makes existing collections, knowledge and services work harder for the people they're meant to serve.
What makes a good fit
The projects we're looking for have a clear path beyond the proof of concept. We want to measure and demonstrate real value, whether that's time saved, people reached or barriers removed, so you can take that evidence to your board or funders and make the case for full rollout.
You don't need a polished proposal. If you have a challenge you think AI might help with, a budget to co-invest and the authority to drive change, that's enough to start a conversation. We can help shape the idea, assess feasibility and scope something worth building.
How it works
You tell us about a challenge or an idea. We assess every application for impact, feasibility and potential. For successful applications, we explore scope and data readiness together, co-invest to build a proof of concept, and help you build the case for funding, adoption or wider rollout if it works.
Not quite ready to apply?
That's fine. If you've got the seed of an idea but aren't sure whether it's right for the co-fund, get in touch anyway. We can help you shape it into something worth testing. And if an AI framework or accelerator session would be a better first step, we can talk you through that too.
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