Museums have long used technology — but that use, and the potentials it opens for cultural organisations, creative practitioners, and their audiences — has never been evenly distributed. Digital inequality is persistent and the consequences of being on the wrong side of what we used to call the digital divide are increasingly profound. While the COVID-19 pandemic created an environment in which rapid digital transformation was necessitated, not all organisations were able to undergo that transformation, whether at all or to the same extent. And since then, dramatic technological advancements across domains like artificial intelligence and automation have only come faster and been taken up by a growing audience. For cultural organisations that have not already invested in digital resources, where and how we might respond to these developments becomes an urgent question that has implications for both our operation and our purpose. Drawing on empirical research with cultural organisations across Australia, practice-based experience from working in ACMI, Australia’s museum for screen culture, and a review of the international context, we ask what the current digital state of play is for cultural organisations, and how we might collectively negotiate the near digital future.