New sectoral frontiers and a grand finale
For its third professional day, on June 13, vivatech-2025/" class="k-autolink">VivaTech 2025 expanded its spotlight toward new innovation frontiers in business sectors. The show explored how tech is disrupting fields as varied as tourism, commerce, human resources, and finance. In the TravelTech space (K24), players like Accor, Club Med, or the ADP group presented digital solutions to reinvent the travel experience – whether through AI for hyper-personalized customer service in the hotel industry or robotics to streamline airport passage. A few stands away, RetailTech was also in the spotlight: for example, the French startup Vusion showed how its smart labels and computer vision can transform physical stores into optimized connected spaces (stock reduction, sales assistance, etc.). The Fnac-Darty group (Hall 2) also exhibited AI-driven in-store innovations. Regarding Human Resources and productivity, solutions like Airudi (an AI-powered recruitment tool, presented at the Canada Pavilion) or Freddy AI by Freshworks (chatbots and generative assistants for customer support) illustrated how intelligent automation serves companies and employees. Even contract signing is being reinvented: DocuSign unveiled its Iris AI engine, which brings automation and semantic analysis to every stage of an agreement’s lifecycle. Finally, the firm KPMG (G28) presented Linkup, a conversational agent capable of performing natural language web searches to provide decision-makers with structured, up-to-date information – one more example of AI designed to augment human expertise.
Beyond the stands, the conference stage saw significant highlights at the end of the show. Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva, shared “5 lessons from a decade of hypergrowth” during an inspiring interview. In ten years, his Australian startup grew from a small design tool to a global visual communication platform with over 230 million users. Obrecht emphasized the importance of staying user-centric and building a resilient culture to sustain growth – principles that allowed Canva to succeed, and which he places at the heart of its new expansion phase. Shortly after, Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI, took the stage to discuss “the era of AGI” (artificial general intelligence). Without any major announcement, she outlined the prospects of future transformations for companies: according to her, OpenAI and its peers are shaping a future where AI will be a daily partner, “co-developing” with humans in many fields. Companies must therefore prepare to integrate these advanced models and rethink their processes to take advantage of this new paradigm.
Quantum technology also made a notable appearance: Nobel Prize winner Alain Aspect (CNRS/Institut d’Optique) and Jay Gambetta (VP IBM Quantum) hosted a session on quantum computing and its future impact. “The quantum revolution might not be for tomorrow morning, but the foundations are being laid today,” warned Alain Aspect, encouraging leaders to anticipate now the ongoing advances. They explained how qubits will allow for solving problems beyond the reach of classical computers, potentially disrupting sectors like cryptography, logistics, or chemistry. Message to companies: it is time to invest in quantum skills so as not to miss the boat when this technology reaches maturity.
Among the unusual events of the day, a mock trial opposing a human lawyer and an AI captivated the audience. Organized on the Discovery Stage, this playful rhetorical contest – “Human Lawyer vs AI” – highlighted the strengths and limits of AI in a legal context. While AI can analyze thousands of pages of case law in the blink of an eye, the pleading emphasized that legal reasoning is not reduced to data: nuance, ethics, and empathy remain human assets difficult to replicate. This exercise pedagogically raised the question: how far can law be automated without betraying its humanity?
Closing the afternoon, other sessions looked toward the future. John Elkann (CEO of Exor) and former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta debated Europe’s place in the global tech race, calling on the continent to play collectively to avoid becoming a passive market. And to end on a note of bold optimism, Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, took the audience “to infinity and beyond” by exploring the future of open-source AI. He advocated for a truly collaborative and transparent AI, developed as a global common good – the only way, in his view, to avoid a monopoly by a few players over closed models.
Throughout the day, the show also welcomed many international public figures (ministers from Canada, Estonia, Morocco, Nigeria, etc.), testifying to the global interest sparked by VivaTech. In the evening, the professional part of the show ended in a festive atmosphere thanks to the electro concert by The Blaze (during Viva Night at the Dome) and various after-work events organized in Paris. VivaTech 2025 thus bows out with a very positive balance sheet: for three days, tech connected startups, industrial leaders, and public decision-makers around the major challenges of our time. From AI to quantum, from climate to health, innovation showed itself at its best, ready to reinvent our ways of living and working – with humans firmly placed at the heart of the equation.
