Manuel Charr, How Cincinnati Museum Center Built an AI Learning Community, MuseumNext, 29 May 2026
Most museum staff don’t need to be convinced that AI is changing things. What they need is somewhere safe to figure out what that actually means for their work — and permission to be honest about how they feel. Cincinnati Museum Center decided to build that space themselves.
The museum — a natural history and science museum, a history museum, and a children’s museum, all housed within a National Historic Landmark art deco train station — has a staff of around 180. When Whitney Owens, Chief Learning Officer, and her colleagues began thinking about how to approach AI, they didn’t start with a policy or a training programme. They started with a question: how do you bring people who feel completely differently about something into the same room and get them to learn together?