Jinka at VivaTech 2026.

I took the early train from Vannes to Paris and spent two days at Porte de Versailles walking the floor at VivaTech. Here’s what I saw.

The scale of it hits you right away. 200,000 people from 165 countries, and it felt more international than French, with a strong East Asian and Indian presence. India was the official AI Country Partner this year, and Prime Minister Modi was on the ground for it, which gave the Indian pavilion a different kind of energy from the rest of the floor.

Within the first few minutes I had an AI camera analyzing my face to find an ideal makeup tone, fully autonomous robots playing football and kicking each other, the usual round of self-driving cars not quite driving themselves, and a fully autonomous boba-making machine in the Taiwan pavilion. The Taiwan space ended up being where I spent a lot of my downtime between conversations. Twenty thousand steps a day will do that to you.

How AI is being talked about

The biggest shift from previous years is in how AI shows up. It’s still everywhere on the floor, but it has moved from headline to background. Saying your software uses AI is close to saying it runs on a computer at this point. The booths drawing real attention had stopped leading with AI as the pitch and were leading with what the product does and what result it delivers.

One person I talked to near the Taiwan pavilion called it “LLM soup,” and walking the smaller startup stands afterward, it was hard to disagree. A lot of them are a clean interface and a polished presentation built on top of a standard model from somewhere else, sold as a custom solution. That worked well a couple of years ago. It feels like that window is closing.

Where the serious conversations were happening

The people wearing buyer badges, the ones evaluating vendors, were not at the flashy consumer stands. The real business conversations were happening in the heavy sectors: logistics, healthcare, insurance. These industries stayed away from AI for years because their regulatory environment and human factors made it too complicated. That seems to have changed. They are open to it now, but they are not looking for horizontal platforms that try to do everything. They want specific tools built for their exact problem. Clinical note generation for doctors, compliance tracking for legal teams. Purpose-built, not general purpose.

That feels like a real shift. The easy generalist play is crowded. The infrastructure work in sectors that are finally ready to modernize, but need it done carefully and to spec, is where the conversations have moved.

Sovereignty as a procurement requirement

European data sovereignty was the other consistent theme. Every country pavilion had some version of it. The preference for locally run models, EU-hosted infrastructure, and full data residency in European jurisdiction is no longer a policy position. It has become a procurement requirement.

For companies that can’t go fully local, the common answer was what one person described as a hybrid sovereignty architecture: using various AI components together with encryption running across the process to stay inside compliance. Safety, privacy, and certification matter here in a way that is different from the US market, and the companies that understand that difference are the ones getting serious meetings.

Time with the OVH team

OVH is a company we think highly of, and their presence at VivaTech matched it. One of the best-looking booths on the floor, and a team that takes their work seriously. We also got a chance to demo the new workspace tool they just announced, and it looked very promising. We had good conversations about internal tooling, where their platform is going, and the kinds of problems we both see clients running into as European infrastructure expectations shift. The kind of in-person exchange that emails can only partially replace.