Paris tech events this week: 2,800 seats for AI on Saturday night

Saturday, 20:00, Le Grand Rex. Motion Plus Design fills a 2,800-seat cinema with ten speakers on what AI is doing to creative work, to jobs and to how we feel, and keeps going until midnight. That is how this week of tech events in Paris starts: fifteen rooms between Saturday and Thursday, up from ten last week, with the biggest one first.

We opened Paris recently, so read this as a hand-picked week, not the whole city. Fifteen is what we have checked and will put our name to.

The Big One: AI Evening at the Grand Rex

AI Evening - Sat 14 Nov, 20:00 to midnight, Le Grand Rex, paid (no price on the listing), in French.

Motion Plus Design's second AI Evening is a designed line-up, not a panel. Étienne Mineur on vibe coding as the new craft for creatives. Olivier Reynaud of Aive on whether models that generate video can read it. Economist Axelle Arquié of IFE on automation's coming shock to employment. Nadia Guerouaou, from cognitive neuroscience, on how AI reshapes our emotions. Nicolas Saada on who really makes the images in cinema. Five more after that, enthusiasts and critics both.

Go if your craft is one the tools are rewriting: designers, creative technologists, anyone who directs or edits. Investors and enterprise buyers can skip it; nobody is pitching. Four hours of it: eat first.

The week ahead: daytime halls, evening rooms

Paris splits cleanly this week. By day, conferences with badges and a programme. By night, smaller rooms where you can reach the speaker.

By day

Forward Data Conference 2026 - Mon 16 Nov, doors 08:30, Maison Internationale, Cité Internationale Universitaire, paid (prices not published; 20% off for groups of five). Three stages, thirty-plus talks, about 650 data people, Joe Reis among them. French data engineering on its own production systems.

Digital Trust Conference (Assises de la confiance numérique) - Tue 17 Nov, 14:00-19:00, Studio Gabriel, free. The Fédération des Tiers de Confiance du numérique turns 25 with workshops on cyber threats, sovereignty, quantum and how far to trust a thinking machine. Regulators and parliamentarians in the room.

Tech Show Paris 2026 - Wed 18 and Thu 19 Nov, from 10:00, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, free with registration. Five co-located shows: cloud, DevOps, security, data, data centres. Efficient if you are scoping a stack, tiring if you want ideas.

Beyond Capital 2026 - Wed 18 Nov, 14:00-19:30, Le Village by CA, EUR 19, approval-gated, in French. France Angels opens the 21st Business Angels Week: twelve angel networks, more than 1,000 investors behind them, one afternoon.

OVHcloud AI Summit 2026 - Thu 19 Nov, keynote 10:00, Carrousel du Louvre, free. 1,500-plus attendees and Octave Klaba on stage: Europe's largest independent cloud on what it will and won't build for AI.

AI Product Leaders Club by Wivoo - Thu 19 Nov, arrivals 11:30, Wivoo, 8e, free. The CPOs of Bpifrance and Meilleurtaux and Alma's VP Operations on scaling AI past the pilot. Not recorded.

By night

Paris Tech Forum: From Lisbon to Helsinki - Mon 16 Nov, 17:00, STATION F, free, approval-gated. ACT's founders' panel, between Web Summit and Slush. What gets said here goes to Brussels.

Field Report: Putting AI Pipelines into Production - Mon 16 Nov, 18:00-20:00, address on acceptance, free, in French. datacraft hosts Daniel Altunay of FilterGenie on LLM document extraction that survives production.

Agent Stack Series #00: Holo AI Night with Vercel and H Company - Wed 18 Nov, doors 18:30, near Porte-Saint-Denis, free, kept small. H Company trains its Holo agent models here; this is them on System 1 models.

Then Thursday, four rooms inside an hour:

AI Builders Meetup by Databricks x OpenAI - doors 18:00, STATION F, free, in French. Cost, governance and model churn, with SESAMm's head of data science on switching models without losing quality.
Women in Robotics Paris x Foxglove - doors 19:00, Enchanted Tools, 11e, free, about 90 places. Speakers from Balyo, Enchanted Tools and Wandercraft. Open to anyone in robotics.
Pivoting After Y Combinator: Thomas Minassian on .Wave - 19:00-20:30, Paris 2e, free, 60 places, in French. Voice cloning to a GPU inference engine, no slides.
Storytime by Hexa: Building Europe's Leading EV Charging Network, with Aurélien de Meaux - doors 19:00, Hexa, 12 Rue Martel, free. From Cheerz to Electra: software to concrete and grid connections.

By the numbers

15 tech events, up from 10 last week.
12 free to register, one at EUR 19, two paid with no published price.
6 on Thursday 19 November. Nothing on Friday 13 or Sunday 15.
3 send the address only once you're accepted.

Hidden gem: a morning on AI's power bill

AI and Sustainability Workshop - Tue 17 Nov, 09:30-13:00, Salle Dussane, ENS-PSL, 45 rue d'Ulm, free.

What France's new data centres cost in power, heat and grid capacity. Cecilia Rikap, author of The Rulers, keynotes at 10:00; Loup Cellard covers why data-centre waste heat goes unused; a panel at 11:40 tries to forecast token consumption. Numbers, not positions. We spotted it because nobody there is selling anything.

Who should go where

Investors, Wednesday afternoon at Beyond Capital, where France's angel networks share one floor. Thursday night, pick Hexa or swanbase by thesis: hardware at scale, or AI infrastructure after a pivot.

Founders, raising seed? Beyond Capital. Fed up with EU rules? Monday's Paris Tech Forum, where the complaints have somewhere to go. Thinking about a pivot? Thursday at swanbase.

Builders, three evenings: datacraft Monday, Agent Stack Wednesday, Databricks Thursday. Skip Tech Show unless you are buying infrastructure.

Sales and marketing, Tech Show Paris. The IT buyers walk that floor for two days, and registration is free. The Wivoo lunch is the smaller room with product budget holders in it.

Worth knowing

Six rooms are approval-gated, and three only send the address once you're accepted: Field Report, Agent Stack and swanbase. Apply this weekend.
Thursday evening runs from the 13e to the 11e and the 10e: STATION F, Enchanted Tools and Hexa all open within an hour. Pick one and stay.
The Wivoo lunch is not recorded. If you want the CPOs' answers, be in the room.

Tell us what we're missing

Next week stays busy: Be SOVEREIGN on the 23rd, Compute! Paris at the Sorbonne on the 25th, DevFest Paris on the 27th. Browse the full Paris listings and book Saturday first. Early readers decide what this page covers, so if your room isn't on it, send it over and we'll read it before next Friday.