In 2024, everyone was experimenting with AI, trying to find something of value amid all the hype. This year, the focus has changed, and the discussions at VivaTech were completely different: “What tangible business results are you seeing from AI?” and “Is it mature enough for customer-facing retail?” For the startups, the questions were: “How big are you? How long have you been in the market?”
“In just one year, the conversation has shifted completely—from what’s possible to what’s measurable.”
—Julian Skelly, Head of Retail EMEA and APAC, Publicis Sapient
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced partnerships to optimize sovereign LLMs across six European countries, with Perplexity distributing localized reasoning models through its enterprise platform. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas revealed Germany is already their second-largest market by revenue.
Retailers should evaluate where their key partners are located. This technology infrastructure will be at the core of how they set themselves up for the future.
The technical advantages are measurable. Local AI infrastructure eliminates trans-Atlantic data transfers, reduces latency to milliseconds, and ensures GDPR compliance by design. For a retailer processing customer interactions across multiple countries, those milliseconds compound into a competitive advantage.
We’ve been waiting three years for the infrastructure to match our ambitions. Now we have it.
L’Oréal’s AI stack now generates thousands of tailored assets in minutes using Adobe Firefly, Omni 3D twins, and Google Veo. They’re creating TikTok-ready videos, in-store displays, and e-commerce content at scale.
The productivity gains are staggering. Traditional product photography costs $300-500 per SKU and takes weeks to coordinate. L’Oréal’s system generates localized variations for different markets in real-time. One product launch can instantly become 500 variations optimized for demographics, channels, and local preferences.
Their marketing director demonstrated the workflow: upload one product image, specify target markets and channels, and watch the system generate culturally appropriate content for Tokyo, Stockholm, and Sao Paulo in under ten minutes.
If your creative pipeline still requires booking photography studios, you’re already behind.
Turn your content supply chain into a growth driver now.
Nestlé is scaling from 4,000 to 10,000 digital twins using NVIDIA Omniverse and Azure, cutting costs by 70%. They’re localizing packaging and simulating entire campaigns before shipping a single product.
The operational impact is immediate. Instead of printing test packaging and running focus groups across multiple markets, they simulate consumer responses digitally. Campaign testing that used to take months now takes hours.
Ambitious ideas about real-time supply, real-time pricing, real-time traffic analysis are finally reality.
VusionGroup’s cloud-based IoT platform caught our attention not for its technology, but for its business results. Retailers report a 30% reduction in pricing errors, 25% improvement in inventory turnover, and real-time shelf visibility across thousands of locations. The system uses electronic shelf labels connected to a single camera infrastructure. When inventory drops below threshold levels, prices adjust automatically. When competitors change pricing, the system responds in real-time while maintaining margin targets.
During the demo, a quick-service restaurant showed their system automatically removing out-of-stock items from digital menu boards and suggesting alternatives based on preparation time and ingredient availability.
When their ice cream machine went down (it always goes down), customers immediately saw different dessert options without staff intervention.
This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about enabling higher efficiency and lower carbon impact while transforming stores into data-driven, customer-centric environments.
Multiple startups demonstrated handheld counterfeit detection devices achieving 99.7% accuracy in under ten seconds. The technology analyzes material composition, manufacturing patterns, and microscopic details invisible to human experts.
For luxury resale platforms like Vestiaire Collective or The RealReal, this represents a fundamental shift.
Authentication that previously required expert human evaluation now happens instantly at scale.
Counterfeits aren’t just about lost sales, they erode brand trust. This technology lets us protect brand integrity in real-time.
After evaluating dozens of solutions, there are some that are emerging as ready for adoption:
If you’re curious how to integrate these technologies into your business, we’d love to show you. We rebuilt a retail e-commerce experience with filters, price sorting, real-time inventory, and more in under six minutes using Sapient Slingshot, our proprietary AI development platform.
Let me know if you’d like to set up a time to see it.
Let's turn what we saw at VivaTech 2025 into action inside your organization.
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