How Valae automated 92% of customer service

Moco Museum Amsterdam — a historic townhouse on Museumplein with cyclists passing by

Overview

Europe's most-visited independent art museums

Moco Museum's multinational locations exhibit works by Banksy, Warhol, Basquiat, Kusama, Keith Haring and others alongside immersive digital installations. Founded in 2016, Moco has welcomed over 6 million visitors from 120+ countries across locations in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and London.

Design-forward, culturally sharp, and fundamentally marketing-led, they have a ~200-person team and a 10-person customer service operation handling enquiries across 3 countries and 15+ languages.

Moco Museum gallery with Keith Haring artworks and an Arsham eroded Porsche sculpture

The Challenge

Six problems hiding in one inbox

Moco's customer service challenges went far beyond email volume. Each problem compounded the others, creating a crisis that cost the organisation time, money, and its most valuable talent.

3-day response time

Customers waited an average of three days for a reply. On weekends (peak visitor time) almost no emails were answered at all.

Revenue slipping through

Venue rental enquiries worth six figures were missed, buried alongside routine ticketing questions. Group bookings and partnerships suffered the same fate.

120+ visitor nationalities

Emails arrived in dozens of languages, but staff could only comfortably reply in English, leaving gaps for a global audience.

Broken tooling at €500/month

Their old, legacy tools failed to track email threads, missed colleague replies, and created confusion. Staff worked from multiple systems simultaneously, duplicating effort.

Marketing team in the trenches

The customer service team was so overwhelmed that marketing staff were regularly pulled into answering routine customer emails.

Hiring pressure, no budget

They needed more customer service staff but didn't have the budget to hire. The situation was unsustainable, and getting worse every week.

The Foundation

One AI brain. Everything else follows.

Before building any tool, we ran Step Zero, our process for creating a comprehensive AI brain. We ingested and structured everything Moco knew into a single source of truth.

1

Ingest

Pulled in data from internal documents, email inboxes, call transcripts, all three websites, policies, brand guidelines, exhibition info, pricing, reviews, and press coverage.

2

Structure

De-duplicated, cleaned, tagged, and permissioned everything into a single AI brain across all locations and languages.

3

Deploy

Built an email AI agent on top of the brain, working natively inside Gmail, no new tools, no training, and no disruption to existing workflows.

Data sources we ingested:

Internal documents and spreadsheets Customer service email threads Staff call transcripts FAQs from all three websites Website content (all locations) Internal policies and procedures Brand tone and style guidelines Artist and exhibition information Pricing and booking data Customer reviews (TripAdvisor, Google) Media coverage Creative assets (visual and written)

The Tool

An AI colleague in the inbox

On top of the AI brain, we deployed an email automation agent that works natively inside Gmail. It' like a knowledgeable, diligent colleague who reads, classifies, responds, and knows when to hand off.

1

Reads

all incoming customer emails across Moco's inboxes

2

Classifies

by topic (ticketing, refunds, bookings, partnerships, etc.)

3

Organises

into Gmail folders by category, every minute of every day

4

Responds

92% of the time, with multilingual, source-grounded answers

5

Escalates

8% of the time to the right person, with full context attached

info@mocomuseum.com — Inbox

Sophie Moreau Demande de remboursement — billets Amsterdam

Refunds 10:23

Hans Mueller Gruppenbesuch Anfrage — 40 Schüler, 22. April

Group Bookings 09:51

James & Partners LLP Venue rental enquiry — summer gala

Venue Rentals 09:14

María García Re: Entradas Barcelona — 6 personas

Ticketing Yesterday

S

✦ AI is writing…

Reply sent

Escalated to venue coordinator

24/7 coverage

Works around the clock. Three-day waits and zero weekend replies became three minutes, any time, any day.

No new tooling

Works inside Gmail. Staff open their inbox and everything is sorted, most things already answered. Replaced an expensive, cumbersome legacy system (€500/month).

Acts like a colleague

Doesn't auto-reply with templates. Reads, understands, classifies, and responds with contextual, source-grounded answers.

Multilingual by default

93 languages handled natively. The response gap for non-English-speaking visitors disappeared overnight.

The Results

A foundation that compounds

Built in just two weeks, Moco's AI brain grows in value with every interaction. The email AI replaced an expensive broken tool and eliminated the need for planned customer service hires. The marketing team returned to high-value creative work.

0

of customer emails fully automated

0

response time, down from 3 days

0

from kickoff to live in production

0

languages handled natively

Moco Museum London location with vibrant window displays

Futuristic geometric light sculptures at Moco Museum London

What's Next

The next chapter: driving revenue

Valae is now building additional tools on top of the same AI brain. These include automated SEO research and AI-written blog content that draws on Moco's deep exhibition and artist knowledge, in their exact brand voice.

Because Step Zero is already done, these tools plug straight into the existing foundation, and are faster and cheaper to deploy each time. One brain, growing tool count, compounding value.