How a session in Paris is put together
French works-council consultation can sit on the critical path for anything that changes how people work, so the sequence is agreed before the date is. Every keynote is tailored after a briefing call, and the larger engagements start before the day rather than on it: a diagnostic of the client's own people, so the room hears its own evidence rather than somebody else's. What the room leaves with is written down.
What that has looked like: about 1,500 people joining a session run hybrid from central London at short notice, for a technology business changing AI tools faster than its people could absorb, which became executive coaching for the transformation lead; and an agency business convening Asia, Asia-Pacific, EMEA and North America into one event, where the work was naming the recurring situations nobody had vocabulary for, and the company took that wording into its strategy.
Six of the seven engagements published on this site produced further work after the session rather than at it. The seven are set out in full at case studies, each with a line saying what it does not show.
How to read these examples. They are published to show how the work is put together, not as a client list for Paris. Most engagements are covered by confidentiality and are described without naming anyone; where a client is named anywhere on this site, it is with their agreement.
The French duty that lands before the technology does
Article L2312-8 of the Code du travail requires the comité social et économique to be informed and consulted on questions concerning the organisation, management and general running of the undertaking, and names among them « L’introduction de nouvelles technologies, tout aménagement important modifiant les conditions de santé et de sécurité ou les conditions de travail »: the introduction of new technologies, and any significant adjustment altering health and safety conditions or working conditions.
It is binding, it bites at fifty employees, and it is the reason an AI rollout in a French organisation has a consultation on its critical path that its London or New York equivalent does not. Read at the Ministry of Labour’s own Code du travail numérique, where the article is marked as updated 25 August 2021.
Worth saying for accuracy: this is a duty to inform and consult, not a veto. It changes the sequence and the timetable rather than the decision.
The regulator that will police workplace AI, and what it has not yet published
Under the national governance scheme published by the Direction générale des Entreprises and the DGCCRF on 9 September 2025, the authority designated for high-risk AI in emploi, gestion de la main d’œuvre is the CNIL. The CNIL is also designated for the prohibition on inference of emotions in the workplace.
That is a data protection regulator holding the employment file, which is a meaningful choice and not the arrangement every member state has made.
The status matters and is usually reported wrongly. The DGE’s own governance diagram carries the line « Sous réserve de l’acceptation par le Parlement dans le cadre d’un projet de loi »: subject to acceptance by Parliament by means of a bill. As at 7 September 2026 no page on any French government domain states that the bill has passed. So France has published its scheme and has not yet legislated it, and anybody telling a Paris audience otherwise has read a summary rather than the source.
The CNIL finalised its recommendations on developing AI systems on 22 July 2025 and, on that page, had not issued a workplace framework: it describes having begun a reflection process with sector stakeholders to define one. The regulator that will police employment AI has not yet said what it expects.
France does publish an adoption figure, and it does not mean what it is used to mean
INSEE reports that 18 per cent of enterprises used at least one AI technology in 2025, against 10 per cent in 2024 and 6 per cent in 2023, with the EU average at 20 per cent. By size: 15 per cent at ten to forty-nine employees, 31 per cent at fifty to two hundred and forty-nine, and 58 per cent above that. By sector, information and communication leads at 59 per cent and transport and storage trails at 9 per cent. Insee Première number 2120, published 21 July 2026.
The population is enterprises of ten or more employees in principally market sectors, excluding agriculture, finance and insurance: about 194,000 enterprises employing 13.5 million people, from a sample of 11,000.
And the caveat INSEE attaches to it, which almost nobody carries. The survey measures organised use. In INSEE’s own words, responses « n’incluent en principe pas les utilisations de l’IA que peuvent faire les salariés ponctuellement et à titre individuel »: they do not in principle include ad-hoc individual use by employees. So 18 per cent is what French organisations have adopted, and it is not what French employees are doing. Anyone quoting it as the second has misread it.
No equivalent headline statistic was found from DARES, which runs seminars and research calls on AI and employment rather than publishing an adoption series. Stated as a search-limited negative rather than as a proven absence.
The three keynotes a Paris room can book
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes, in person or virtual. A 30-minute main-stage version of each talk is available for conferences; the full argument needs 40 or more. The sector examples change for the room; the argument does not. All three, with the showreel, are at keynotes, and the programme copy is at the speaker pack.
Drift versus Design
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
Most organisations are adopting AI by drift: a thousand reasonable decisions that add up to judgement nobody chose to give away. Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills, shows leaders which mode they are running, where AI sharpens judgement and where it weakens it, and hands them the controls.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
AI makes everyone faster, stronger and more capable. It does not decide; people do. Through a family story across four generations and three continents, Rahim Hirji hands the audience the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. They arrive thinking AI is the story and leave knowing they are.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
Business is being rewired as AI arrives, and human judgement is leaving with it. In three acts, Rahim Hirji shows a board what AI is changing in how organisations run, then ends with a live test of the board's own judgement, in the room and in real time. Nobody forgets the result.
Where these sessions happen in Paris, and when they can
Capacities below are the venue’s own published figures, read on the venue’s own site rather than from a directory. Viparis operates three of the four, so viparis.com is the operator’s own domain despite looking like a portfolio.
- Palais des Congrès de Paris
- The Grand Amphithéâtre seats 3,723, plus ten wheelchair spaces, and can be run as a half-house at 1,813. Metro line 1 at Porte Maillot, RER C and E, tram T3b. The amphitheatre has direct internal access to the breakout and catering levels, so a delegate never leaves the building between sessions. Stage 1,200 square metres with ten metres of height over it.
- Paris Convention Centre, Porte de Versailles
- A 5,200-seat plenary on level 7.3, inside Pavilion 7. The load-in on level 7.1 is level access, so a large stage build rolls in rather than being craned, which is the single biggest cost difference between Paris venues for a production-heavy keynote. A planted rooftop terrace sits directly above the plenary.
- Maison de la Chimie
- The Amphithéâtre Lavoisier seats 853, being 516 in the stalls and 337 in the balcony. Its foyer has natural daylight onto a private 900 square metre garden, which is rare in central Paris at this size. Three interpreting booths and a 6.3 by 3.6 metre screen. Metro at Invalides or Assemblée Nationale.
- Les Salles du Carrousel, Carrousel du Louvre
- The Espace Le Nôtre holds 1,600 and the Gabriel and Delorme spaces combined hold 2,200. Retractable tiered seating turns the same footprint from a plenary into a flat-floor dinner overnight. A separate caterer’s office and goods lifts mean catering never crosses the plenary. Note that higher theatre figures circulate for this venue and do not appear anywhere on its own site.
Two 2027 dates are published by their organisers and both fall in the same week of June, which is worth knowing before proposing one. VivaTech runs 16 to 19 June 2027 at Porte de Versailles. The International Paris Air Show at Le Bourget runs 14 to 20 June 2027, its 53rd edition and a hundred years since Lindbergh arrived there.
One to keep off a Paris plan. GLOBAL INDUSTRIE alternates between Paris and Lyon and its 2027 edition is in Lyon, 15 to 18 March at Eurexpo, per the organiser’s own site. Any 2027 Paris list carrying it is wrong.
And one name change. Paris Retail Week no longer exists under that name. From 2025 it was rebranded as NRF Retail’s Big Show Europe, same city and same venue, confirmed in the co-organiser’s own release. Big Data & AI Paris continues and has announced a repositioning toward enterprise decision-makers.
Dates for Big Data & AI Paris, Produrable, Tech for Retail and NRF Europe are not yet published for 2027, so this page names their most recent confirmed edition rather than extrapolating a pattern.
