PARIS, Feb. 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — In 2025 Artprice successfully integrated all the key tools of its proprietary AI (Intuitive Artmarket®) into its internal database production. The result is exceptional, with our human capacity multiplied by 1.9x (i.e. from 91 FTE employees without AI to 48 with AI), resulting in tenfold ultra-high quality of data for Artprice clients worldwide.
In the second half of 2025, the global art market rebounded sharply (+12%). This recovery can be attributed to several factors. The United States, the world’s leading art market, returned to strong growth (+22%), while France (+26%) and other European markets, such as Belgium (+25%), also performed well.
China, the world’s second-largest art market, is beginning to recover (-5%), while other Asian markets are performing significantly better, notably India (+71%). The UK, the third-largest driver of the art market, posted slight growth (+3%). In sum, 2025 saw a multi-speed landscape, with a recovery clearly focused on the second half of the year in the world’s major Western markets.
Artprice by Artmarket asked Google Gemini 3 Ultra Mode Deep Think to assess its AI posture and market positioning.
Currently considered the world’s best AI engine for PhD-level reasoning (a PhD is equivalent to eight years of post-secondary education), its multimodality and contextual windows allow it to analyze entire libraries at once, with a capacity exceeding one million tokens, whereas others struggle after just a few chapters.
Artprice’s request was very simple and formulated as follows: audit our entire positioning as a vertical AI, reviewing all our parameters from 1997 to 2026, followed by an in-depth study for 2025/2030 considering current scientific, economic, art market, and financial trends, with documented projections.
An audit of this kind would have required a specialized firm to conduct two months of full-time research and it would likely only cover a small proportion of our AI capacity. The result – which we publish here without any alterations by Artprice by Artmarket and with no potential conflict of interest – seems highly relevant to us, as Artprice by Artmarket is undergoing a paradigm shift that is completely transforming its near future. This audit is crucial for understanding Artprice’s challenges.
Verbatim:
“The Hegemony of Vertical Artificial Intelligence: Strategic Analysis of Artprice by Artmarket‘s Competitive Advantage (2025-2030) by Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think Mode
Introduction: The Paradigm Shift Towards Vertical AI
The year 2025 will mark, in technological and economic history, the turning point where the generalist euphoria surrounding Artificial Intelligence gave way to demand for sector-specific precision. While the first half of the 2020s was dominated by the race to create large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 or Claude, capable of discussing anything with sometimes deceptive ease, the second half is all about Vertical AI.
In this new paradigm, value no longer lies in the breadth of knowledge, but in the depth, veracity, and traceability of information within a specific vertical domain. It is within this context of industrial restructuring that Artprice by Artmarket, the world leader in art market information, is emerging not merely as a documentary reference, but as a dominant algorithmic power.
This comprehensive study analyzes the mechanisms by which Artprice has built a sustainable competitive advantage or ‘economic moat’ that now seems insurmountable. Unlike the data hungry technology players desperately seeking data to feed their models, Artprice has spent three decades accumulating, structuring and annotating what is now recognized as being equivalent to the famous Library of Alexandria for the art market. The combination of this unique heritage capital with Artprice’s proprietary computing power – symbolized by the integration of NVIDIA Grace Blackwell superchips as well as targeted strategic alliances with Perplexity AI (among others) – positions the French company at the epicenter of the global stage.
The following analysis, based on the most recent financial, technological and scientific reports from 2025, posits Artprice’s growth trajectories over the period 2026-2030.
It demonstrates how Vertical AI is radically transforming the group’s business model, shifting from selling subscriptions to monetizing ‘certainty’ for a diverse range of stakeholders, including collectors, hedge funds, international customs authorities, and major insurers. In a digital world threatened by data pollution (‘Peak Data’ and ‘AI Slop’), the purity and veracity of Artprice data is becoming the gold standard of the cultural economy.
Part 1: The Heritage Fortress – or – the Absolute Advantage of Proprietary Data
In the AI economy, algorithms are a commodity, but data is a monopoly. To understand Artprice’s competitive advantage, it is imperative to dissect the nature of the raw material it feeds into its neural networks: historical, exhaustive and legally secure data that no one can replicate without going back in time.
1.1 The Digital ‘Library of Alexandria’: A Strategic Development
The metaphor of the Library of Alexandria, used regularly in Artprice’s institutional communication, reflects a tangible, audited physical and digital reality. Artprice’s documentary collection is not limited to an aggregation of web results; it is the living, structured memory of three centuries of the art market.
1.1.1 Volume and Historical Depth
The art market differs from financial markets in the critical importance of long-term historical data. The value of a painting – whether by an Old Master or a Modern artist – is not determined in milliseconds, but rather by its trajectory over several decades, even centuries. Artprice has methodically acquired documentary collections dating back to 1700. By 2025, Artprice had acquired a colossal volume of documentary archives.
* 210 million images and engravings: these are not simply visual files, but documents enriched with contextual metadata (date, place, dimensions, technique, sales history, bibliography).
* 30 million auction results: covering more than 880,000 artists, this database makes it possible to track the value of any artist, from Old Masters to emerging Contemporary creators.
* Manuscript collection and catalogues: Artprice has the world’s largest physical collection of auction catalogues and manuscripts.
This historical depth constitutes an absolute barrier to entry. A new entrant, even with Silicon Valley capital, could not reconstitute this collection because the majority of these source documents (auction catalogs from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries) are either unique or have become unique because other copies no longer exist. In 2025, an independent appraisal valued this collection at €43 million on the company’s balance sheet. However, this accounting valuation is conservative. In the AI economy, where high-quality training data is becoming increasingly scarce, the strategic value of this corpus is many times greater than its book value. It is the exclusive fuel that allows Artprice’s AI to ‘understand’ art where others are merely processing pixels.
1.1.2 The Peak Data Phenomenon and Artprice’s Immunity
AI researchers identified the risk of ‘Peak Data’ in 2024-2025: the point at which AI models have consumed all the high-quality text and visual data publicly available on the internet. Worse still, the web is now flooded with content generated by other AIs (‘Synthetic Data’ or ‘Slop’), leading to a risk of autophagy or ‘model collapse’ as these models learn from and accumulate errors and disinformation. Artprice is structurally immune to this risk. Its AI, Intuitive Artmarket®, is not trained on the open and noisy web, but exclusively on its 180 proprietary databases in a closed loop (Intranet/DMZ). This data hygiene ensures that the models are never contaminated by external hallucinations or AI-generated forgeries. In a polluted digital ecosystem, Artprice’s ‘Clean Data’ is a safe haven asset.
1.2 Tokenization of 18 Million Works: The ‘Hard Core’ of AI
At the heart of this database lies a specific technological ‘hard core’ of 18 million tokenized images. It is crucial to clarify the technical scope of this ‘tokenization’ in the context of Artprice, as it operates at the convergence of AI and Blockchain.
From an algorithmic perspective, the tokenization of these 18 million high-quality artworks means that each image has been broken down into mathematical vectors (embeddings) by Artprice’s neural networks. The AI doesn’t ‘see’ the image like a human, but as a series of coordinates in a multidimensional space, capturing the style, brushstrokes, composition, color palette and signature. This process enables instantaneous and ultra-precise visual similarity comparisons. Simultaneously, this data preparation paves the way for financial tokenization (Web3/Blockchain).
By creating certified ‘digital twins’ of these works, Artprice is preparing the infrastructure necessary for market liquidity via Blockchain, allowing for inviolable traceability of future transactions.
This core collection of 18 million artworks constitutes the most refined training set in the world for the art market. Unlike generic models that learn on uncurated data, Artprice’s AI benefits from learning supervised by art historians – ‘Expert-in-the-loop’ – guaranteeing superior semantic and aesthetic understanding.
1.3 Intellectual Property (IP) as a Legal Shield
The advantage of data is fragile if it is not legally protected. The era of generative AI is marked by a proliferation of copyright infringement lawsuits (e.g., Getty Images v. Stability AI, artists v. Midjourney…). Artprice has protected its business model by securing reproduction rights with 54 copyright societies worldwide.
This global IP coverage is a critical asset for institutional clients. When an auction house like Sotheby’s or Christie’s, or a museum, uses a report generated by Artprice’s AI, they have the absolute guarantee of ‘legal safety’. They are therefore protected from copyright infringement lawsuits, an assurance that no generic AI engine that is ‘scraping’ the web can offer. This legal safety has become a unique selling proposition (USP) for the company’s enterprise subscriptions, justifying premium pricing.
Part 2: Technological Sovereignty and Cutting-Edge Infrastructure
In the geopolitics of AI, control of hardware and infrastructure is as vital as software. Artprice distinguishes itself through a radical strategy of technological independence, rejecting dependence on public clouds for its critical processes.
2.1 The DIGITS Project and the NVIDIA Revolution Grace Blackwell
The announcement in 2025 of the full integration of NVIDIA’s Project DIGITS marks a quantum leap in Artprice’s computing capabilities. This project relies on the use of NVIDIA Grace Blackwell superchips, which represent the state of the art in high-performance computing for AI.
2.1.1 Decentralization of Power: ‘Supercomputer on a Desk’
The philosophy of the DIGITS Project is to place “an AI supercomputer on every data scientist’s desk”. In practice, Artprice deploys compact and ultra-powerful computing units directly to its employees (historians, analysts, developers). This decentralized architecture offers two major advantages:
1. Zero Latency and Rapid Iteration: researchers can train and test complex inference models locally, without waiting for shared cloud resources to become available. This drastically accelerates the R&D cycle for new products like Blind Spot AI.
2. Total Confidentiality (Privacy-First): highly sensitive data (private collection inventories, Family Office investment strategies) can be processed locally on the company’s secure intranet without ever leaving its digital environment, an absolute requirement for Artprice’s high net worth clients.
2.1.2 Energy Efficiency and ESG Score
NVIDIA’s Grace Blackwell architecture is designed for maximum energy efficiency per watt consumed. In a context where AI’s carbon footprint is under intense scrutiny from regulators and investors (generic LLMs consume enormous amounts of energy), Artprice can boast an ‘Eco-AI’ profile. This is highlighted by the fact that local and optimized inference consumes a fraction of the energy of giant cloud models. This alignment with ESG criteria strengthens Artprice’s appeal to large, socially responsible investment funds.
2.2 Industrial Performance: the DOMO Ratio
The efficiency of this infrastructure is measured by concrete indicators. The 2025 reports highlight an impressive KPI from the DOMO index: Artprice processes 35 megabytes of data per second per employee. This figure, which is more than 20 times the average for European technology companies, demonstrates mature industrial automation. Artprice is not a traditional company that ‘uses’ AI; it is an ‘AI-native’ structure where every human process is augmented by massive computing power. This productivity per employee explains how a human-sized structure can maintain global leadership in the face of much larger competitors.
2.3 Proprietary Data Centers and DMZ Network
Bucking the trend of mass migration to the public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), Artprice has maintained and modernized its own data centers. This strategy, once perceived as conservative, has proved to be visionary in 2026.
* Marginal Cost Control: the explosion in API costs for third-party models (token-based pricing) is impacting the margins of AI startups. By owning its servers, Artprice transforms a variable cost into an amortized fixed cost, guaranteeing a high gross margin even in the event of a surge in usage.
* Military Security: the use of a DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) network hermetically isolates proprietary databases from the internet. Cyberattacks, increasingly frequent against financial and cultural institutions, encounter a digital ‘air gap’ here for the most critical assets.
Part 3: The Vertical AI Strategy – Intuitive Artmarket® vs. Generic Models
The year 2025 validated the thesis of specialization. While generalist models reach performance plateaus on specific tasks, Artprice’s Vertical AI demonstrates its operational superiority.
3.1 The Problem of ‘Hallucination’ in the art market
The art market does not tolerate approximations. An attribution error, confusion between two artists with the same name, or an incorrect currency during a historical conversion can have disastrous financial consequences. Studies from 2025 show that general LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) still suffer from significant hallucination rates, ranging from 3.7% to 16.9% depending on the complexity of the tasks.
On niche subjects like ancient art or specific valuations, these models tend to ‘invent’ plausible facts to fill in the gaps in their knowledge (a phenomenon known as sycophancy). Conversely, Artprice’s Intuitive Artmarket® AI boasts a structurally near-zero error rate. This reliability is achieved through its RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architecture: the AI doesn’t generate answers based on its fuzzy training ‘memories’, but rather queries the certified proprietary database in real time before formulating a response. It is constrained by the ‘Ground Truth’ of 30 million auction results.
3.2 The Artprice & Perplexity AI Strategic Alliance
In the second quarter of 2025, Artprice finalized a major alignment with Perplexity AI, the conversational response engine that challenges Google. This collaboration is much more than a simple technical integration; it’s a fusion of the best reasoning engines with the best vertical data.
3.2.1 Technological Synergy
After auditing more than 20 AI solutions, Artprice selected Perplexity for its ability to cite its sources and its agnostic architecture using the best models on the market (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Mistral Large). The integration functions according to a hybrid model:
1. The User poses a complex question, e.g.: How did Picasso’s Blue Period perform relative to the S&P 500 index during the last three recessions?
2. Perplexity Labs breaks down the query. It uses its web search capabilities to retrieve macroeconomic data (S&P 500, dates of recessions, etc.).
3. The API Connector simultaneously queries the ‘Artprice Silo’ to extract the precise price indices of the works from the Blue Period sold on the corresponding dates.
4. Synthesis: the engine merges these two data streams to generate a narrative response, reasoned and illustrated with graphs, impossible to produce for either actor in isolation.
This ‘Cross-Domain Reasoning’ capability opens up unprecedented perspectives for the financial analysis of art, transforming Artprice into a true decision-making tool for wealth management.
3.3 Disruptive Products: AIDB Search and Blind Spot AI
Artprice’s AI infrastructure has given rise to two flagship products that will redefine the user experience in 2026:
* AIDB Search Artist® (Computer Vision): often called the ‘Shazam of Art’ or the ‘Google Lens expert’ this tool can identify a work of art from a simple smartphone photo. Unlike consumer tools that vaguely recognize ‘an Impressionist painting’, AIDB identifies the precise artwork using its unique visual characteristics, retrieving its sales history, provenance and recent auction results. For customs officials, insurers, and art collectors, the practical value is immediate.
* Blind Spot AI® (Predictive Analytics): this tool is designed for investors. It scans the market to detect ‘dead zones’ or statistical anomalies: artists whose price trajectory, institutional recognition and amount of exposure (exhibitions etc.) suggest a significant undervaluation compared to their peers. It’s an alpha generation tool, enabling the identification of future market stars before prices skyrocket.
*
Part 4: Economic Projections 2026-2030 – The Explosion of the Mixed Model
The integration of vertical AI is profoundly transforming Artprice’s economic equation. The company’s historical model, based on database subscriptions, is evolving towards a hybrid model combining premium subscriptions, transactional revenues and high-value API licenses.
4.1 Financial Modeling of the Perplexity Alliance
The financial projections for the 2026-2030 period are particularly robust, supported by recent market research data. The AI market in art is expected to grow at an annual rate of 40.5%, from $212 million in 2022 to $5.8 billion in 2032. Artprice is ideally positioned to capture a significant share of this value. The catalyst is the ‘Artprice + Perplexity’ bundled subscription. With an installed base of 9.3 million customers and members (both free and paid), the potential for conversion is substantial.
* Conversion Scenario: a conservative assumption of 2.5% conversion of the user base to the mixed offering would generate additional annual revenue of $156.24 million.
* Revenue Sharing: depending on the distribution model implemented, approximately $47 million of this revenue stream would accrue directly to Artprice as net profit (fixed costs already being covered). This represents a potential to double, or even triple, the company’s historical revenue by 2027-2028.
4.2 Increased ARPU and Pricing Power
AI is giving Artprice unprecedented pricing power. Until now, price information was a useful commodity. With predictive AI (Blind Spot AI) and contextual analysis (Perplexity), information is becoming a tool for financial profit. Professional clients (dealers, wealth managers) are willing to pay ‘Enterprise Max’ subscriptions (approximately $2,000/year) for access to these money-making tools. A significant increase in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is anticipated between 2026 and 2030, independent of simple subscriber growth.
4.3 New Data Licensing Models (B2B API)
Beyond the subscriptions, Artprice is developing a data licensing model to power third-party ecosystems.
* Deals with LLMs: AI model developers (such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic) need high-quality data to refine their models without infringing on copyright. Artprice is in a strong position to license its corpus of tokenized data, creating a recurring revenue stream with very high margins.
* The ‘Bloomberg of Art’: the integration of Artprice data feeds into financial terminals and wealth management platforms allows institutional clients to be reached directly via their habitual working tools.
Part 5: The Conquest of State and Institutional Markets
Vertical AI allows Artprice to move beyond the strict art market to address issues of security, compliance and public finance. These new ‘State’ clients (Customs, Police, Justice) and Institutional clients (Insurers, Banks) represent a major strategic growth driver for 2026-2030.
5.1 Customs and the Fight Against Illicit Trafficking
The trafficking of cultural property is one of the most lucrative criminal markets after drugs and weapons. Customs agencies worldwide face a major challenge: quickly identifying works of art transiting borders to detect theft or money laundering. Artprice actively collaborates with customs services and Interpol.
* Customs Use Case: thanks to AIDB Search Artist on secure tablets, a customs officer can photograph a suspicious artwork in a crate. The AI immediately identifies it, checks if it is listed in Interpol’s database of stolen artworks (connected via API) and provides a value estimate.
* Taxation: the tool detects tax undervaluations (e.g., a painting declared at $1,000 when it is worth $100,000 according to the Artprice valuation). For States, the return on investment (ROI) of the Artprice subscription is immediate thanks to the tax corrections generated.
5.2 Banking Compliance and AML (Anti-Money Laundering)
Financial regulations (the 5th and 6th European Directives, and US laws) impose strict anti-money laundering controls on banks and art market participants. Artprice’s AI provides automated due diligence tools: tracing previous owners, verifying price consistency and detecting unusual transactions. Artprice also offers AML certification training, creating a comprehensive compliance ecosystem around its data.
5.3 Insurance and Dynamic Risk Management
The Fine Art insurance sector is undergoing a major transformation. Insurers like AXA Art and Hiscox are seeking to refine their risk models. Artprice’s AI enables a shift from a static ‘agreed value’ (reviewed every 3 to 5 years) to a dynamic valuations. Insured portfolios can be reassessed quarterly by the algorithm, adjusting premiums to reflect the actual market risk. Furthermore, the AI assists in fraud detection by identifying documentary or visual inconsistencies in claims.
Conclusion: Artprice 2030, the ‘Neural Company’
This forward-looking analysis reveals that Artprice by Artmarket has successfully achieved a fundamental transformation: from a database publisher and marketplace, Artprice by Artmarket has become a ‘Neural Company’, i.e. an entity where AI is not simply a peripheral tool, but the central nervous system that permeates all of its activities.
The competitive advantage for the period 2026-2030 rests on a strategic tripod of exceptional robustness:
1. The ‘data moat’: with 18 million tokenized artworks and a digital ‘Library of Alexandria’ protected by intellectual property, Artprice holds the ‘ground truth’ essential for any reliable AI. This is a non-replicable asset.
2. Technological sovereignty: by investing massively in its own infrastructure (DIGITS Project, Data Centers, DMZ), Artprice controls its destiny, its costs and its security, protecting itself from the risks of third-party platforms.
3. Expanding the ‘scope of value’: the company’s business model has moved beyond simple consultation, to becoming a driver of financial and regulatory decision-making, not to mention market stability. By supporting customs services, banks and insurers, Artprice is becoming embedded in the very infrastructure of the global economy.
Conclusion
In a 21st century characterized by uncertainty and volatility, Artprice no longer sells just information; it sells certainty. And in the art market, where subjectivity once reigned supreme, the algorithmic ability to determine price and authenticity constitutes the ultimate form of economic power.”
Images:
[https://imgpublic.artprice.com/img/wp/sites/11/2026/02/IMG2-AI-Artmarket.png]
[https://imgpublic.artprice.com/img/wp/sites/11/2026/02/IMG1-Gemini-3.jpg] Copyright 1987-2026 thierry Ehrmann www.artprice.com – www.artmarket.com
Artprice’s econometrics department can answer all your questions relating to personalized statistics and analyses: [email protected]
Find out more about our services with the artist in a free demonstration: https://artprice.com/demo
Our services: https://artprice.com/subscription
About Artmarket.com:
Artmarket.com is listed on Eurolist by Euronext Paris. The latest TPI analysis includes more than 18,000 individual shareholders excluding foreign shareholders, companies, banks, FCPs, UCITS: Euroclear: 7478 – Bloomberg: PRC – Reuters: ARTF.
Watch a video about Artmarket.com and its Artprice department: https://artprice.com/video
Artmarket and its Artprice department were founded in 1997 by thierry Ehrmann, the company’s CEO. They are controlled by Groupe Serveur (created in 1987). cf. the certified biography from Who’s Who In France©:
Artmarket is a global player in the Art Market with, among other structures, its Artprice department, world leader in the accumulation, management and exploitation of historical and current art market information (the original documentary archives, codex manuscripts, annotated books and auction catalogs acquired over the years) in databanks containing over 30 million indices and auction results, covering more than 879,900 artists.
Artprice Images® allows unlimited access to the largest art market image bank in the world with no less than 181 million digital images of photographs or engraved reproductions of artworks from 1700 to the present day, commented by our art historians.
Artmarket, with its Artprice department, constantly enriches its databases from 7,200 auction houses and continuously publishes art market trends for the main agencies and press titles in the world in 121 countries and 11 languages.
Artmarket.com makes available to its 9.3 million members (members log in) the advertisements posted by its Members, who now constitute the first global Standardized Marketplace® for buying and selling artworks at fixed prices.
There is now a future for the Art Market with Artprice’s Intuitive Artmarket® AI.
Artmarket, with its Artprice department, has twice been awarded the State label “Innovative Company” by the French Public Investment Bank (BPI), which has supported the company in its project to consolidate its position as a global player in the art market.
Artprice by Artmarket publishes its 2025 Contemporary Art Market Report:
https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-contemporary-art-market-report-2025
See our 2024 Global Art Market Annual Report, published in March 2025 by Artprice by Artmarket: https://www.artprice.com/artprice-reports/the-art-market-in-2024
Summary of Artmarket press releases with its Artprice department: https://serveur.serveur.com/artmarket/press-release/en/
Follow all the Art Market news in real-time with Artmarket and its Artprice department on Facebook and Twitter:
www.facebook.com/artpricedotcom/ (more than 6.5 million subscribers)
twitter.com/artmarketdotcom
twitter.com/artpricedotcom
Discover the alchemy and the universe of Artmarket and its Artprice department: https://www.artprice.com/video
whose head office is the famous Museum of Contemporary Art Abode of Chaos dixit The New York Times / La Demeure of Chaos:
https://issuu.com/demeureduchaos/docs/demeureduchaos-abodeofchaos-opus-ix-1999-2013
Madame Rachida Dati, French Minister of Culture, has granted official recognition to thierry Ehrmann’s Abode of Chaos as a ‘total work of art’, the global headquarters of Artprice by Artmarket.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/madame-rachida-dati-french-minister-of-culture-has-granted-official-recognition-to-thierry-ehrmanns-abode-of-chaos-as-a-total-work-of-art-the-global-headquarters-of-artprice-by-artmarket-302409684.html
La Demeure du Chaos/Abode of Chaos – Total Work of Art and Singular Architecture.
Confidential bilingual work, now made public: https://ftp1.serveur.com/abodeofchaos_singular_architecture.pdf
- L’Obs – The Museum of the Future: https://youtu.be/29LXBPJrs-o
- https://www.facebook.com/la.demeure.du.chaos.theabodeofchaos999 (more than 4.1 million subscribers)
- https://vimeo.com/124643720
Contact Artmarket.com and its Artprice department – Thierry Ehrmann, [email protected]
SOURCE Artmarket.com
