VivaTech 2025: Web and AI Tech Trends

The VivaTech 2025 trade show marked a turning point among the world's big tech events. With more than 165,000 visitors over four days, the Paris event surpassed CES in Las Vegas, long considered the largest technology show in the world. This attendance record now makes VivaTech a global reference in the innovation sector. From May 21 to 24, 2025, startups, large companies, investors and institutions gathered at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles to imagine the technologies of tomorrow and share their vision of the future.

A Global Event in the Heart of Paris

Since its creation in 2016, VivaTech has kept growing. This 9th edition confirmed its status as a must-attend event in the global technology landscape. If you want to plan ahead for the year's next tech events, our calendar of must-attend innovation events in 2025 (in French) lists the dates to remember. Organized by Publicis and the Les Échos and Le Parisien group, VivaTech brings together players from all backgrounds every year: startups, large groups, scale-ups, investment funds, but also public institutions and NGOs. The goal? To create a space for dialogue, demonstration and collaboration to move the major digital topics forward.

This year, more than 160 nationalities were represented. Qatar was named guest country of honor, with a dedicated pavilion presenting the country's tech ambitions ahead of the 2030 World Cup. Several Qatari digital leaders came to discuss smart city projects, cybersecurity and clean energy innovation.

Forward-Looking Themes

The 2025 edition highlighted topics that resonate strongly with current events and the challenges of our time.

Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI was everywhere on every booth. LLMs (Large Language Models), responsible AI and automation were explored from every angle, with particular attention to ethics and algorithm transparency. To get a clearer picture of what sets these models apart, our analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the most used generative AIs (in French) offers a useful comparison.

Beyond the hype, real fundamental questions were raised:

• How do you integrate AI into an existing software architecture?
• Which APIs? Which models? And above all: what data governance?

Arthur Mensch (Mistral AI) defended a vision of a more modular, interoperable AI designed for European developers. At Meta, Yann Le Cun reminded the audience of the limits of current models and argued for hybrid architectures combining self-supervised learning and business logic.

Tech for Good

A true common thread in many talks, with concrete applications of technology in education, health, biodiversity and the fight against discrimination.

Ecological Transition

Innovations in sustainable mobility, renewable energy, the circular economy and reducing the carbon impact of digital technology.

Cybersecurity and Digital Sovereignty

Sovereign cloud took an important place in the discussions, with direct implications for companies' Cloud and DevOps (in French) strategies. Players like Scaleway and OVHcloud presented serious alternatives to AWS and Azure, with in-depth thinking on resilience, service portability and GDPR compliance, all critical points in the design of custom line-of-business applications (in French) in PHP or Symfony.

Inspiring Talks With Leading Figures

VivaTech 2025 also means a dense program of talks and keynotes by top personalities. Highlights included:

• Arthur Mensch, cofounder of Mistral AI, presented his vision of a more open and sovereign European AI
• Peggy Johnson, CEO of Magic Leap, discussed the coming revolutions in augmented reality and its uses in industry
• Yann Le Cun, head of AI at Meta, gave a fascinating talk on self-supervised AI and the limits of current deep learning
• Luc Julia, co-creator of Siri, delivered a critical talk on the excesses around AI and the importance of refocusing innovation on people

Not to forget the participation of John Kerry, special envoy of the US president for climate, who called for stronger collaboration between states.

Useful Talks for Developers

Unlike other trade shows that are sometimes too marketing-driven, VivaTech 2025 offered several technical, useful and concrete talks with real value for developers. A few talks to remember:

• "How to integrate AI into a Symfony stack": a demo by Kévin Dunglas on API Platform + LLM
• "Deploying containerized PHP at scale": by the Exotec team, with lessons learned on Kubernetes + GitLab CI
• "Digital sobriety and technical debt: incompatible?": a very lucid talk by Clever Cloud on back-end optimization and architecture choices

For an agency that relies on Symfony for line-of-business application development (in French), these topics are not secondary: they directly affect the maintainability, performance and robustness of the solutions we build.

Startups on the Tech Side: Tools to Watch

In the aisles of VivaTech, there were also tools and frameworks that deserve the dev community's attention:

• Baserow: an open source low-code back end that integrates well with Symfony APIs
• Turso: a distributed SQLite edge database, promising for some decoupled architectures
• Stellate: a GraphQL caching solution designed to improve response times on large schemas

On the DevOps side, demos around Dagger, Tailscale and Qovery show that deployment automation, a central topic of our Docker and Symfony in production (in French) offer, and CI/CD workflow simplification keep progressing, without sacrificing technical rigor.

Our Favorite

The "Tech in Sports" round table hosted by Capgemini, with Antoine Courbon (ASO), Nicolas Vinoy (France Télévisions), Mélanie Bras and Thomas Hirsch (Capgemini). We were captivated by their discussion of the central role of live broadcasting in sport, notably at Roland-Garros and the Tour de France, as well as the challenges of broadcasting. As Nicolas Vinoy pointed out, "sport is live, and it's hard not to get spoiled... because channels are sometimes delayed."

What particularly interested us was their vision of sport enriched by technology. Thanks to artificial intelligence, virtual reality and immersive headsets, spectators who cannot be on site can experience the event as if they were next to the athletes. Thomas Hirsch stressed the importance of these immersive experiences in strengthening fan engagement, while Mélanie Bras highlighted the measurable impact of these connected devices on loyalty.

What stayed with us: this ambition to turn sports broadcasting into an immersive, personalized and emotional experience, where technology creates a new link between the audience and the field.

Going Further

• Eco-design: an ideal in motion? (in French), responsible digital technology
• VivaTech: official website, the innovation trade show
• La French Tech, the French startup ecosystem
• Station F, the largest startup campus in the world