MARKET NOTES:

Two years ago, if someone had told me I’d be using artificial intelligence on a daily basis at the gallery, I probably would have rolled my eyes. Art is human. It’s visceral. It’s about gut feeling. What does AI have to do with any of that?

And yet.

At L’Appartement, we’ve integrated AI in a very concrete way – not to replace judgment, but to sharpen it. And I want to be honest about what that actually looks like, because I think there’s a lot of noise around this topic and not enough real talk.

We built a private database we call Vitryne: every preview we receive from galleries around the world, every art fair PDF, every private offering – automatically extracted, structured, archived. Artist, work, dimensions, price, availability. In real time. When a client asks me « what have we seen from this artist lately, and at what price? » – I have the answer in 30 seconds instead of digging through emails for an hour.

For L’Advisory, it goes even further. Our valuation reports now cross-reference three sources simultaneously: auction results (Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips), press and institutional shows, and our own primary market database. All synthesised, sourced, verifiable. Research that used to take two days now takes a few hours.

We also use AI to build our client presentations – the proposals we send when recommending a work, positioning an acquisition, or presenting an artist. What used to be a half-day of layout and research is now something we can produce at a level of quality and detail that I’m genuinely proud of, in a fraction of the time.

And then there’s the part that still surprises me when I say it out loud: we run AI agents. Actual autonomous agents that monitor the market, track auction calendars, flag relevant results, triage incoming previews, and feed everything into our systems – continuously, in the background, while we’re doing everything else. It sounds very sci-fi. It’s very much not. It’s just become how we work.