Every year since 1987, Austin, Texas, has hosted South by Southwest in March — a sprawling festival blending music, film and interactive technologies, which has become one of the most reliable barometers of global cultural and technological change. Bpifrance attended with a delegation of around twenty French entrepreneurs and the La French Touch teams.
"This year, we broadly moved past the debate for or against AI. There is almost no ideological opposition left. What we see is selective, pragmatic and operational adoption," observes Julie Momas, Principal at French Touch Capital. Perle Bagot, co-founder of the Hub Institute and trends analyst, has been following the festival since 2018. She has watched the major tech platforms arrive, lived through the peak of data and the metaverse craze. But, in her view, it was in March 2023, a few months after the public launch of ChatGPT, that everything shifted. "We plunged headfirst into generative AI. There was euphoria, alongside a great deal of anxiety and questioning about what it still means to be creative," she recalls. Three years on, the tone has changed. "We are less caught up in philosophical questioning. We have moved into the concrete: AI is here, and we need to embrace it. It is something quite serious in the noblest sense of the word — less utopian, less futuristic and more grounded," she says.
Technologies are accelerating and converging, while societies struggle to keep up
This is the first shift identified by La French Touch. Amy Webb, whose annual report on emerging trends is one of the festival's highlights, framed the discussion around a new concept: convergence. Technologies are no longer evolving separately — they are reinforcing and accelerating one another, creating realities that society struggles to adapt to. Human augmentation through exoskeletons and connected glasses, unlimited work through autonomous agents and automated factories, emotional outsourcing to AI for therapy or romantic relationships: the signals are already visible. Between 25 and 50% of Americans are said to use AI for therapeutic purposes today.
Where the consensus begins to fray is over whether organizations can genuinely absorb this acceleration. "This shift is not fully underway today. Technology is moving so fast that it is outpacing our capacity to adapt and integrate it," says Perle Bagot bluntly. She references the concept of "future shock", theorized in the 1960s, which describes that moment of tension when the technological curve overtakes the curve of human adaptability. "This is a profound transformation. It is painful, and it will continue to be," she insists.
What AI cannot do is becoming strategically valuable
This is the second force identified by La French Touch, and the central paradox of this edition: the more we talk about machines, the more we come back to the human. Imagination, emotion, intuition, taste, storytelling — what AI cannot automate is gaining in value. "We are moving from execution-based roles to decision-making, coordination and orchestration roles, with a radically different posture, skill set and company structure," says Julie Momas.
AI adoption remains selective in the French cultural industries. In music, for example, it can speed up pre-production and allows for faster, deeper creative exploration, but "the creation and final selection remains fundamentally human, always guided by artistic intent," she insists. In video games, studios use it extensively as a production tool — to accelerate iteration on prototypes, automate testing and debugging, and optimize development pipelines — but avoid applying it to the creative assets that appear in the final game. "On the creative side, artistic teams are often faster and produce better quality. It is also far safer in terms of copyright and artistic identity," she adds.
Rana el Kaliouby, a computer science researcher, reminded the audience that 93% of human communication is non-verbal. "We will need to find ways to quantify and capture this contextual and emotional dimension in order to integrate it into models," notes Perle Bagot.
Community and experience have become the product
The third shift identified by La French Touch: content alone is no longer enough. It is the experience surrounding the content that creates value, and the community that brings it to life. "We have been observing this trend for a while: creating not just content, but an IP conceived as an open narrative ecosystem, capable of unfolding across formats, experiences and communities," notes Julie Momas. She cites Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed, which has become a full-fledged cultural platform with films, immersive exhibitions, comics, novels and even a symbolic presence at the Olympic Games opening ceremony. She also cites Clair-Obscur: Expedition 33, from the French studio Sandfall Interactive — 5 million copies sold in 2025 — whose original music concerts all sold out. "It is not just a gaming product. It is an aesthetic and emotional world," she says.
Faced with the American model of total vertical integration, embodied by players such as Universal, Live Nation or Disney, the French ecosystem offers something different. "These are more distributed, more hybrid models, with independent players who cooperate on a project-by-project basis rather than through industrial standardization," describes Julie Momas. The example of Le Bureau des Légendes is telling: produced, financed and distributed by a plurality of players, then sold in over 100 countries and adapted for the United States, the series illustrates a logic of IP circulation rather than control by a single platform. This is what La French Touch calls the "archipelago model" — not a system built on concentration, control and scale, but on circulation, agility and cultural resonance.
No panel on climate or ESG this year. For Julie Momas at La French Touch, these subjects remain essential and must continue to be brought to the fore, given how structurally significant they are. She was surprised to see the topic almost entirely absent at SXSW, having been a central subject in previous years. "Perhaps this marks a shift from signaling to integration. For us, these issues are no longer differentiating factors — they have become prerequisites," she says. In French companies, these concerns are no longer treated separately: they are now embedded across all discussions and decisions, at the very heart of business models. This edition also broke politically with previous ones, with speakers openly taking positions against the Trump administration on several stages.
The central message remains this: the winning organizations will be those that have managed to stay deeply human while integrating AI where it creates value.
