If you’ve tried to buy opera tickets online recently, there’s a decent chance you’ve interacted with a chatbot. Maybe you noticed. Maybe you didn’t. And whether that interaction was helpful or infuriating probably says a lot about how well the organisation behind it understood what they were doing.

Virtual assistants and chatbots have been creeping into arts ticketing over the past couple of years, and the results are… mixed. Let me walk you through what’s actually happening.

The Promise

The pitch is straightforward. Arts organisations, especially smaller ones, have limited box office staff. Phone lines are busy during on-sale periods. Email response times can stretch to days. A well-built chatbot could handle the routine stuff — “What time does the show start?” “Are there concession tickets?” “Can I exchange my Tuesday booking for Thursday?” — and free up humans for the complex queries.

For larger organisations like Opera Australia, which handles tens of thousands of transactions each season, even a small reduction in routine enquiries represents significant savings. And for audiences, getting an instant answer at 11pm when the box office is closed is genuinely useful.

What’s Working

Some organisations have implemented simple, well-scoped chatbots that do a few things reliably. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s website assistant, for example, handles basic venue questions — parking, accessibility, dress code — and directs ticketing queries to the right page. It doesn’t try to do too much, and it does what it does well.

A few international companies have gone further. The Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Royal Opera House in London both use AI-powered assistants that can handle subscription enquiries, seat recommendations based on budget and preference, and even accessibility bookings. These are sophisticated systems built on extensive customer data.

In Sydney, some AI agent builders Sydney have been working with cultural organisations to develop chatbots that understand the specific language of arts ticketing — terms like “restricted view,” “premium reserve,” and “rush tickets” that generic customer service bots would stumble over.

What’s Not Working

And then there are the disasters. I personally tested a chatbot on an Australian regional arts centre’s website last month. I asked if children under five could attend their upcoming opera-in-the-park event. The bot told me about their disability access policy. I asked again more specifically. It offered me a link to their café menu.

The problem is that many organisations have implemented the cheapest available chatbot solution without training it on their specific content. A generic customer service bot doesn’t know what “the circle” means (it’s a seating section, not a shape), doesn’t understand that “Saturday matinee” means the 1pm performance, and definitely can’t explain the difference between A-Reserve and Premium A-Reserve.

Worse, some bots are confidently wrong. I’ve encountered chatbots that quoted incorrect prices, provided wrong performance dates, and in one memorable case, told a customer that a sold-out show still had availability. Confidently wrong is much worse than honestly unable to help.

The Accessibility Question

Here’s something that doesn’t get discussed enough: chatbots can be either a huge help or a significant barrier for audiences with access needs.

For deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons, a text-based chat interface is often preferable to a phone call. For people with anxiety, not having to speak to a human can lower the barrier to booking. These are real benefits.

But for older audiences — and let’s be honest, opera audiences skew older — chatbot interfaces can be confusing and frustrating. And for audiences with cognitive disabilities or limited English, a poorly designed bot that doesn’t understand their query can feel exclusionary.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has guidelines on digital accessibility that arts organisations should be following, but compliance is patchy.

What Good Looks Like

The best arts chatbots I’ve encountered share a few characteristics:

They know their limits. When they can’t answer a question, they say so clearly and offer a direct path to a human — a phone number, an email, a callback option. No runaround.

They’re trained on actual arts content. They know what a libretto is. They know that “the season” means the performance season, not autumn.

They handle the emotional context. Buying opera tickets isn’t like buying a widget. People are planning special occasions — birthdays, anniversaries, first dates. A chatbot that treats every interaction as a purely transactional exchange misses something important.

They’re honest about being bots. Nothing erodes trust faster than a chatbot pretending to be human. The best ones identify themselves upfront and set clear expectations about what they can help with.

Where This Is Heading

I think we’ll see more Australian arts organisations adopting chatbot technology over the next year or two. The economics are compelling, especially for companies running on tight margins.

But the organisations that do it well will be the ones that treat it as a customer experience project, not just a tech project. The bot is the first point of contact for your audience. It represents your brand. If it’s clunky, unhelpful, or impersonal, that reflects on everything else you do.

Get it right, and you’ve got a genuinely useful tool that makes opera more accessible. Get it wrong, and you’ve put a robot between your audience and the art they came for.

Choose carefully.