VivaTech 2026

VivaTech 2026 is a speaking event in Paris with a lineup of 1140 speakers, including John Thornhill, Asmita Dubey, and Meredith Whittaker.

Jun 11-13, 2026
Paris, France
80 speakers
103 talks
Official site

Who spoke at VivaTech 2026?

1140 speakers

The full announced lineup for VivaTech 2026. Speakers without a full profile are shown as cards - is one of them you?

Sessions at VivaTech 2026

24 sessions on stage.

10 Years of AI, and What's Next?
Benoît Georges

Ten years after the explosion of artificial intelligence, where do we really stand and what are the next revolutions to expect? Dive into the heart of the major advancements and explore the challenges and opportunities that will shape the future of AI."

2026 Business O Féminin Awards Ceremony - The Women Entrepreneurs Competition 🚀
Charlie PerreauPanel

The 2026 Business O Féminin Awards Ceremony, the 9th edition held under the High Patronage of the President of the Republic, Mr. Emmanuel Macron. Three awards recognize female talent: Start-Up, Scale-Up, and Young.

6 Months to become an AI-Native CMO or become irrelevant
Charlie PerreauPanel

AI is fundamentally reshaping the role of marketing, and the shift is more disruptive than most organizations realize. This isn't about tools. It's about redefining where marketing creates value. The CMOs who will matter automate aggressively to focus on what AI can't replicate: judgment, emotion, and bold positioning. Those who don't adapt risk becoming irrelevant. This talk is about how to take that turn. Practically. Within the next six months.

A Franco-German Blueprint for European Breakthrough Innovation
Nicolas DufourcqPanel

France and Germany have launched a joint task force on breakthrough innovation, co-chaired by Nicolas Dufourcq (Bpifrance) and Rafael Laguna (SprinD). Presented publicly for the first time at VivaTech, the report proposes new modes of action — challenge-driven programmes, empowered programme managers, fast contracting — to equip France with complementary tools, interoperable with Germany, and to spearhead a European approach to breakthrough innovation.

AI for What Matters : Transforming Essential Sectors
Charlie PerreauPanel

This talk will explore how AI can help transform essential sectors, through the perspective and commitments of Veuve Clicquot.

AI’s Boom: Where Are Investments Going and Why?
Nalin Patel

The AI boom is entering a new phase. Early excitement around large models is now giving way to a deeper race for the infrastructure and applications that make AI work in the real world. From the chips and energy systems powering massive data centers to the rapid rise of specialized AI applications across industries, the geography and priorities of investment are shifting fast. Governments, venture capital, and tech giants are all competing to fund the next layer of the AI economy. This opening keynote explores where capital is flowing across the AI stack, from computing power and infrastructure to vertical applications, and what these investment patterns reveal about the next phase of the AI revolution.

Achieving the Impossible: Innovation, Exploration and the Power of Mindset
Bertrand Piccard
Alternative Facts: Separating Truth from Misinformation in the Age of Deepfakes
Greg WilliamsPanel

Seeing is no longer believing. With a simple prompt, anyone can now create images, sounds or videos that appear perfectly convincing. Newsrooms, HR departments, cybersecurity firms and all of us going about our daily lives are all hitting the same wall: we need to find new ways to verify real-looking media that can be generated in seconds. How can we move towards a "provenance-first" culture, where the origin of media matters as much as the content itself? What guardrails, from digital watermarking to human verification policies, can companies and regulators adopt? And as the technology evolves, what happens to our legal and social systems when evidence can no longer be taken at face value?

Arming and Funding Europe: The Sovereignty Wake-Up Call
Stefan SchaiblePanel

A hard look at Europe’s ability to defend itself and finance its own champions, from defense industrial ramp-up to integrated capital markets and strategic infrastructure.

Beyond Language Models: Building AI that Understands the World
Yann LeCun

Large language models have transformed how people interact with AI, but are they enough to achieve truly intelligent systems? Yann LeCun has long argued that the next breakthroughs will require machines capable of understanding the physical world, reasoning about their environment, and learning with far less human supervision. In this conversation, he shares his vision for the future of AI, the limitations of today's approaches, and the scientific challenges that remain unsolved.

Beyond the Bank Branch: Bringing Back Trust to Small Business Lending
Max Schertel

For years, local bank branches knew their small business customers by name. Today, the small business financing gap in Europe sits at €400 billion. Max Schertel co-founded finmid on the belief that this relationship can be rebuilt through the platforms small businesses already rely on daily. In this Founder’s Story, he unpacks why data and distribution are the real barrier to solving SMB lending, the hard lessons of building lending infrastructure across Europe, and why the next chapter of SMB lending will not be written by banks.

Beyond the Big Names: Where the Next AI Leaders Are Emerging Globally | Featuring Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2026 Insights
Jarek KutylowskiPanel

This session opens with a 10-minute launch of the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2026, where Stephan Kuester will present key insights from this year's report. While much of the AI conversation focuses on investment trends and frontier models, a different story is unfolding beneath the surface. Across the world, new ecosystems are producing high-potential AI companies through unique combinations of talent, industry depth, and commercialization pathways. This session explores where real AI innovation is emerging beyond the dominant hubs, bringing a ground-level perspective from founders and ecosystem leaders on how AI businesses are being built and scaled.

Beyond the Résumé: What AI Means for How We Hire and Who Gets Ahead
Charlie PerreauPanel

The next job interview you get may already have been decided by an algorithm. AI is transforming recruitment at speed, parsing thousands of résumés in seconds and flagging candidates before any human has weighed in. But this efficiency may come with hidden trade-offs: while automated systems promise to identify the best candidates, they risk codifying historical prejudices if their training sets are flawed. The same technology promising to democratize professional opportunity can quietly gatekeep it along lines nobody chose to draw. At the same time, AI is redefining what professional competence looks like, and the definition keeps shifting. The skills that secured a job three years ago may already be obsolete; the ones that matter tomorrow are still emerging. For individuals, careers are no longer linear paths but continuous negotiations with a technology that won't stand still. For organizations, the challenge cuts deeper: if the benchmark for talent keeps moving, how do you hire for potential rather than credentials? Which skills allow employees to be adaptable and grow? How can we ensure the "intelligence" in HR remains genuinely human-centric, and who is ultimately responsible when a machine makes a career-altering decision?

Born Global, Built at Speed: Inside Deel's AI Engine
Alex Bouaziz
Building Europe’s Space Industrial Backbone
Cedrik NeikePanel

In a fireside chat, Cedrik Neike and Akilles Loudière will discuss Europe’s industrial competitiveness and the digital transformation of the space sector, highlighting how the Siemens–ArianeGroup partnership supports the ramp-up of Ariane 6 and strengthens Europe’s sovereign access to space.

Building a Star Trek Vision
Albert Wenger

Star Trek, the original TV series from the late 1960s, provided a positive vision of the future. Energy that is too cheap to meter. On demand manufacturing of complex parts. Instant diagnostic and healing of disease. Highly skilled and well-educated humans collaborating across race, gender, nationality. With our rapidly advancing technological capabilities, what can we build today as entrepreneurs and governments to work towards this vision?

Building the Road to Space
Mike MassiminoPanel
Built to Last: The Business of Long Term Success
Philippe BotteriPanel

Europe's economy is often viewed through two lenses: high-growth startups and global corporations. Yet much of its strength lies in the businesses in between—companies that evolve, adapt, and grow over decades rather than years. And in a business environment defined by constant disruption, longevity is becoming an achievement in its own right: many of Europe's most successful organizations have thrived by continuously adapting to changing markets, technologies, and customer expectations. As AI reshapes industries and economic uncertainty persists, what separates companies that successfully reinvent themselves from those that fall behind? In a world increasingly focused on disruption, how do you build not just the next success story, but the conditions for long-term prosperity? Bringing together perspectives from venture capital and banking, this conversation explores what it takes to create enduring value in Europe today.

Can Europe Build Global Champions?
Greg WilliamsPanel

Europe has talent, capital, and ambition, yet its most promising startups still struggle to scale, or leave. Somewhere between early growth and global scale, momentum is lost. Why? The reasons are debated: fragmented markets, regulatory complexity, access to capital. New ideas like the 28th regime aim to simplify this path and reduce friction across borders. Yet the question remains whether structural change can keep up with the speed at which companies need to grow. Is Europe solving the right problem? And what would it take to turn a strong startup ecosystem into a true scale-up economy?

Can Europe Stand on Its Own Two Feet in Tech?
Nick CleggPanel
Can Healthcare Data Finally Become AI-Ready?
Charlie PerreauPanel

AI is advancing rapidly across healthcare, but deployment remains far more difficult than the hype suggests. Behind nearly every promising use case lies the same challenge: fragmented data, legacy infrastructure, regulatory complexity, and systems that were never designed for AI at scale. For organizations moving beyond experimentation, the question is no longer what AI can do—but whether the underlying data can support it reliably in real-world environments. What changes when AI becomes embedded into everyday workflows across R&D, operations, manufacturing, and support functions? And how do companies build systems that are secure, interoperable, and robust enough for one of the world’s most regulated industries?

Controlling Machines with Your Mind: The Rise of Neuroadaptive AI
Olivier Oullier

In May 2024, a paralyzed woman carried the Olympic torch using nothing but her mind, hinting at a wider shift. IBM and Inclusive Brains present multimodal brain-computer interfaces that let machines sense users and adapt in real time, regardless of physical abilities or needs.

Democratizing Mental Healthcare: Can Algorithms Scale Empathy?
Charlotte JeePanel

Demand for mental healthcare is rising worldwide, while therapists and care systems remain overstretched. A new generation of AI-powered tools, from conversational companions to clinically supervised digital therapies, expand access to support and may be reducing pressure on care providers. But mental health is built on trust, empathy, and human connection. Can algorithms portray these qualities and should it be allowed in the mental healthcare space?

Digital Money, Real Power: The New Architecture of Finance
Jeremy AllairePanel

Stablecoins and tokenization are rewiring the foundations of global finance, moving money and assets onto open, internet-native rails. A new infrastructure is taking shape—one that promises faster settlement, programmable value, and broader access to capital markets. What does this shift mean for the future of money, markets, and the institutions that move them? From digital currency to tokenized funds, explore how traditional finance and crypto are converging—and who stands to gain in the new architecture being built today.

Frequently asked

Who spoke at VivaTech 2026?
1140 speakers, including Ahti Heinla, Aidan Gómez, Akhila Kosaraju, Albert Wenger, and Alex Bouaziz.
What did VivaTech 2026 cover?
Topics include Digital Transformation, Startup Founder Journey, Journalism & Nonfiction, Generative AI & LLMs, Innovation, and Venture & Fundraising.
When and where was VivaTech 2026?
Jun 11-13, 2026 in Paris, France.

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