Peterhof Uses AI to Improve the Visitor Experience

From an Hour to a Few Minutes

In the Peterhof State Museum-Reserve is Russia’s most visited museum, welcoming around five million guests each year. With the introduction of new AI-driven tools, staff now spend far less time on routine tasks. AI systems help them quickly locate information within the museum’s extensive research corpus and monitor visitor feedback across multiple platforms.

One of the key solutions is a research-focused AI assistant built on the Yandex AI Studio platform. It works like a chatbot and allows users to ask detailed questions, such as how many times Peter the Great visited Peterhof, and receive answers with precise references down to specific source pages. The assistant operates on Peterhof’s internal research collection, which includes academic papers, archival documents, and analytical articles. What previously took hours can now be done in minutes. Over time, this tool could form the foundation for a shared research environment connecting multiple museums.

Another AI-powered feature is a custom platform that collects and analyzes feedback from various online sources. The system groups data by topic and location and presents it in a clear, filterable interface. Users can sort reviews by date, average rating, sentiment, source, and other parameters, turning scattered feedback into a structured management tool.

Previously, reviewing and analyzing visitor feedback could take several hours a day. Automation has reduced that process to just a few minutes, allowing museum staff to respond more quickly and plan future improvements based on real visitor expectations.

Using artificial intelligence gives teams a real opportunity to relieve colleagues from routine tasks and allow them to focus on research and creative work. At the same time, it is also a technical matter. Today, AI is already used for climate control. Not in our museum yet, but in the future, I am confident it will also help reduce routine work and tasks that are still largely done manually

Daria Parfenenko

Deputy Director General for Exhibition Activities, Tretyakov Gallery

A New Level of Reputation Management

The use of AI to organize museum operations reflects a broader trend in the cultural sector. Automating analytics improves reputation management and helps raise service quality in cultural institutions, where feedback cycles are traditionally slow and fragmented.

The project also plays a role in advancing IT education. It shows how students can be involved in solving real-world problems through collaboration with a major technology company. HSE University’s Faculty of Computer Science has partnered with Yandex since 2014, jointly training machine learning engineers and data analysts.

A Universal Approach

While the AI tools were designed primarily for Russia’s cultural sector, the underlying approach is broadly applicable. Similar systems could be adapted for museums and cultural organizations abroad, as well as for academic and archival institutions. The research assistant could support other scholarly environments, while the feedback analysis platform can scale to tourist attractions and customer analytics services in general.

As a result, the technology has the potential to become an export-ready B2B solution at the intersection of AI, data analytics, and digital services for cultural institutions.

The AI tools developed by students with Yandex’s support highlight the maturity of AI adoption beyond purely commercial domains. They demonstrate how artificial intelligence can deliver tangible value in cultural and research settings, offering a strong example of collaboration and a meaningful case of digital transformation in the cultural sector. In the coming years, similar platforms are expected to be adopted by other cultural institutions across Russia, alongside a growing role for Yandex’s AI solutions in education.