One of Musa's core features is that it deeply understands the place you're in. We built it for museums, and that's where most of our work is.
Next week we start our first pilot beyond the museum floor. Together with Leipziger Messe we built a guide for MUTEC 2026, the trade fair for museum and exhibition technology in Leipzig on 5 and 6 November. It's live now. We've been at plenty of fairs as exhibitors, and this is the first one we guide.
Like a museum, a fair is a lot to take in. MUTEC has more than 170 exhibitors and close to 80 talks on several stages, the information changes right up to opening day, and most visitors are seeing the hall for the first time. But a museum usually has a tour, where someone decided what you see first and what comes after. At a fair everyone comes for something different, so everyone needs their own route.
The guide opens on the hall plan with every stand on it, and the programme of every stage on one timeline.
You can ask it anything about the fair, for example "which exhibitors do audio guides?" or "who could help us light a dark gallery?" It knows what every exhibitor makes, not just their names. It answers in seven languages, including Polish and Chinese, and each stand or talk in the answer opens on the plan with one tap.
Anything that sounds interesting goes on your saved list with one tap. Then "show on map" lights up your saved stands on the plan and numbers them in walking order, measured along the aisles, with a line from one to the next. At the fair you tick off each stand as you reach it. If you skip ahead, the route re-plans from where you are, and the next three stops are always at the bottom of the screen.
You can also email yourself a link to your plan. It opens your saved list, your route and your conversation with the guide on any device, with no account or password, and the guide picks up where you left off.
Leipziger Messe published an interview about the guide on 20 October, and visitors started planning with it the same week. Over those first days the MUTEC team added a lot of information to answer questions visitors already had, for example whether the talks are recorded or streamed (they aren't) and whether there's a hall plan to download (there's a printed fold-out plan on site).
In museums too, the questions the guide can't answer show the team what to add. At MUTEC they started weeks before the doors opened.
We want to see how people use a guide when there's no set route, and whether they find the stands and talks they came for. And we want to see which of their questions help the fair plan next year's. We'll write up what we saw afterwards.
We're at stand F15, and we're giving two talks in German. On 5 November at 11:30 in the Pitch Area we talk about learning from visitors ("Vom Besucher lernen"), and on 6 November at 13:30 in the Ausstellerforum about the curatorial voice in the age of AI ("Die kuratorische Stimme im Zeitalter der KI").
Much of the German museum world is in Leipzig that week. If you run a museum, a fair or a conference and want a guide like this, get in touch.
