If the entrepreneurs, investors and researchers present at VivaTech 2026 seemed to share one thing in common this year, it was a certain fatigue with AI washing.
It was overflowing everywhere, artificial intelligence was everywhere: on the stands, in the pitches, in the press releases, in the institutional speeches. It sometimes became difficult to distinguish what was a real technological breakthrough from what simply consisted of adding the letters “AI” to an existing product.
As artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, it paradoxically ceases to be a differentiator. This is probably why the real topic of VivaTech 2026 was not artificial intelligence, or more precisely: it was not artificial intelligence itself.
What appeared in the aisles of Hall 7, in conversations between investors, in the most attended demonstrations and in the most strategic interventions told something else. The projects that attracted attention concerned robots, energy infrastructure, semiconductors, quantum, health, space and even new industrial architectures.
As if artificial intelligence was gradually disappearing from the technological landscape. Not because it loses importance, but because it becomes a commodity.
The same phenomenon happened with the Internet, in the mid-90s, the network was the main topic. A few years later, no one was visiting a business because it was using the Internet. What mattered was what she built with the Internet. Artificial intelligence is entering a comparable phase.
At VivaTech, the most interesting was therefore not always where the eyes were focused, but appeared implicitly in the demonstrations of humanoid robots from Agibot and Unitree, in the space ambitions of Blue Origin and The Exploration Company, in the batteries of Nyobolt, in the quantum systems of IBM and Pasqal, in the medical implants of Blueprint Biomed or in the drug discovery platforms of Alithea Biotechnology.
Over the course of four days, another reading of the show gradually became necessary: VivaTech did not simply describe the emerging technologies, but drew a map of the global technological balance of power.
Four visions of the future under one roof
So, if the stands of Meta, Alibaba, Mistral AI, Unitree, Pasqal or Samsung have nothing in common, they each tell a different vision of the future.
The United States continues to dominate the most profitable segments of the digital economy. The interventions of Amazon, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Meta or Google revolved around fundamental models, calculation, cloud infrastructures and future human-machine interfaces. When Jeff Bezos talks about the Moon, when Amazon presents its specialized chips or when Meta continues its experiments around connected glasses, it is not simply a question of innovation, but of controlling the future layers of distribution of technology.
China tells a different story.
Unitree’s humanoid robots were probably one of the most photographed attractions at the show. However, their interest does not lie only in their technical performance. China’s show of force is based less on isolated innovation than on the capacity to execute. Massive access to robotic data, integration of the industrial chain, control of manufacturing costs, speed of industrialization: in certain areas, notably embodied robotics, China is no longer seeking to catch up with the United States or Europe, but is already building a structural advantage.
Europe is pursuing a different trajectory, the multiple stands of Frenchtech, the giant space of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, demonstrated the same concern: securing certain critical layers of the value chain: semiconductors, cloud, calculation, models, quantum. The word sovereignty came up everywhere, but behind the political discourse hid a much more trivial reality: how to avoid total dependence on American or Chinese infrastructure?
Finally, India was moving forward according to its own logic, the presence of the Indian pavilion and the interventions of Narendra Modi highlighted a strategy based on public digital infrastructures. Where the United States favors private platforms and China relies on its industrial power, India is building systems intended to serve hundreds of millions of users in financial, administrative or health services.
Everyone plays a different part of the same game.
At the end of four days of conferences, demonstrations and meetings, one conclusion is clear: VivaTech 2026 looked less like a showcase of innovation than a snapshot of new global technological power relationships.
And this is probably what made it the most interesting edition since its creation.
By the way, congratulations to Maurice Levy and his teams.
