A Week in Paris, and What It Left Me Thinking About

Some weeks quietly rearrange the furniture in your head. Last week in Paris was one of them. I spent it moving between the noise of VivaTech and the calmer research floors of the École des Ponts business school, and I came home thinking less about technology than about people.

I should say plainly that I was there as a guest and a student, not an expert. I am grateful to Miki for inviting me to join the sessions alongside her and the other cohorts, and for the chance to sit among genuinely deep thinkers and mostly listen. What follows is less a verdict than a set of notes I am still turning over.

VivaTech, in its tenth year, set the tone. Maurice Levy opened by reminding the room that when this event began, the word startup was barely used in Europe. Now it is where, in his phrase, ideas meet reality. I walked floors where AI was being built into energy generation and where luxury, lifestyle and technology mixed openly. What stayed with me was not any single product, but how much of the interesting work was happening at the seams between disciplines.

The École des Ponts sessions gave that impression an evidence base. One research stream applied Porter’s Diamond model to fashion clusters in Milan, Paris, London and New York and found that competitiveness comes from the ecosystem, the universities, the heritage, the proximity of specialised producers, not from cost or technology alone. Another traced the silver economy literature and showed AI and machine learning becoming its dominant research cluster after 2017. Value, it seems, now sits in the connective tissue between fields, and so does risk.

Nowhere was that clearer than a session on supply chain due diligence. From 19 July 2026, large companies face a ban on destroying unsold textiles and footwear under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, while the separate Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive extends legal responsibility across the whole value chain rather than a single supplier. The point that landed for me was simple. A single company audit misses the problem, because responsibility now runs across the entire chain.

The governance panel made it personal. Boards, the argument went, can no longer treat technology as procurement to be delegated to a CTO once a year. Fluency in AI is becoming a board level responsibility, and directors cannot disclaim accountability for decisions made in their name. UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, adopted by 193 member states in 2021, came up as the only global standard we have. So did the question of who is in the room. The World Economic Forum puts women at roughly a third of the data and AI workforce but barely 12% of the most senior STEM leadership roles, a reminder that a governance model is only as good as the range of people shaping it.

That last thread carried into the IWBD roundtable, where senior women leaders were candid about what actually moves careers. Mentoring builds a network, they said, but sponsorship, senior people advocating for you behind closed doors, is what changes a trajectory. Structures matter, but so do the human relationships that quietly animate them.

Only on the way home did a single thread pull all of this together. There is a name for what I kept seeing. Industry 5.0, the European Commission’s successor idea to Industry 4.0. Where 4.0 chased connectivity and efficiency, 5.0 puts the human back at the centre, sustainable and resilient by design. Almost everything that moved me last week was a version of that same correction, in fashion supply chains, in boardrooms, in who gets to lead.

Hamilton Mann, himself a doctoral researcher at the École des Ponts and author of Artificial Integrity, makes the case better than I can, that we should design AI for integrity rather than raw intelligence. I am genuinely excited for the work he is developing, which draws the judicial, executive and legislative strands of regulation into a single foundational blueprint for how AI should be built. It is the kind of thinking the law will need too.

Which is, tentatively, where I land. If there is a thread I want to follow in the coming years, once SQE1 and SQE2 are behind me and I can speak as a qualified solicitor rather than an interested observer, it is this. Helping organisations build governance that keeps people, accountability and durability at the centre. What I have quietly started to think of as Legaltech 5.0. Paris did not hand me the answer. It gave me better questions.