Become a keynote speaker: what 1,155 speakers at VivaTech show

If you want to become a keynote speaker, VivaTech 2026 in Paris shows how many speakers compete for the attention of a large audience: according to the press release of 21 June 2026, the event, which took place from 17 to 20 June 2026 at the Paris Porte de Versailles exhibition centre, drew more than 200,000 visitors from 165 nationalities, more than 15,000 startups and 1,155 speakers. The release names five speakers, among them Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Blue Origin and Bernard Arnault of LVMH, which is 0.4 per cent of all speakers. For specialists this means that the main address on a large stage follows a path on which a name is built and references accumulate. If you invest in that path, you collect talks at specialist conferences before you apply for the opening or closing slot.

VivaTech 2026 in numbers: 1,155 speakers and five names

According to its press release, distributed by PR Newswire, VivaTech met in Paris in June 2026 for the tenth time. The figures come from the organiser itself, which describes its edition as a record in the headline, and they should therefore be read as self-reported.

The release lists Jeff Bezos (Amazon and Blue Origin), Dave Limp (Blue Origin), Bernard Arnault (LVMH) as well as Henna Virkkunen and Ekaterina Zaharieva (both European Commission) as speakers. A ministerial delegation from Germany as Country of the Year was also present, as was India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose country was the AI Country Partner. New this year were the VivaTech x Bloomberg Awards and the formats Business Plaza and Investors Office Hours, which according to the release were meant to speed up business connections.

To become a keynote speaker is to join the few names on the programme

A keynote speaker is a speaker who gives the main address of an event to the whole audience. How the keynote sits in a conference programme and how it is awarded is described in our article What is a keynote at a conference.

VivaTech shows how scarce this slot is relative to the total number of speakers. We calculate with open assumptions: the release names five speakers, and assuming that these five stand for the main stage, that is 0.4 per cent of the 1,155 speakers. For every named person there are 231 speakers in total. The release gives no number of keynotes, so the calculation remains an order of magnitude that shows how few speakers shape the image of an event.

All five speak for large organisations according to the release, and their names appear in the announcement before anyone reads the programme in detail. That fits what we described in our article on the keynote: organisers usually award main addresses directly to people whose name attracts attendees. How VivaTech selects its speakers is not stated in any of the sources we opened, so we claim nothing about it and limit ourselves to what the figures in the release show about the ratio of individual names to all other speakers.

The other 1,150 speakers show where specialists appear

According to the calculation, the other 1,150 speakers stand on the stages and in the formats behind the five names. For consultants and developers with a specialist topic, this part of the programme is in our experience where conversations with clients begin, and arithmetically it is more than 200 times the number of named main speakers. An event with more than 4,500 exhibitors and more than 15,000 startups offers many potential conversation partners for a specialist topic.

Our founder Marin Niehues has received more than 100 invitations on six continents, has been named Most Active Speaker by Sessionize in 2024 and 2025 and has spoken at more than 50 conferences in 30 countries. Which fees are usual at the top level and what alternative there is for specialists is explained in the article Should I aim to become a paid keynote speaker?.

Become a keynote speaker in three stages: a plan for the coming years

The release shows no route for applying, so we describe a plan based on our experience, which remains an interpretation. It works upwards through three sizes of stage.

A calculation shows what the first stage delivers. Suppose you give six talks a year for two years and half of the conferences record, then after 24 months you have twelve appearances and six videos. That is the material you send to an organiser when you apply for the opening slot. How many submissions those twelve appearances take is worked out in the article How many abstracts do I need for one acceptance?.

What organisers want to see before they ask you for the main address

The release does not cover this, so this section rests on our experience with organisers. Whoever awards a main address wants above all to know how a person comes across in front of a large hall, and an excerpt of an earlier appearance shows that faster than any description. In addition there is a topic that can be explained to all attendees in one sentence, because beginners sit next to experienced people in the hall, and an answer to the question of what the audience will do differently afterwards. An enquiry that contains a video, the sentence on the topic and a short list of earlier specialist conferences answers these three questions without the organiser having to ask.

Five steps to become visible as a keynote speaker

1. Sharpen your topic into a message you can say in one sentence. How to find such a stage topic is shown in the article What should I talk about?.
2. Submit to specialist conferences whose audience is your clients and collect talks in specialist tracks that way.
3. Secure the recordings and clarify beforehand with the organiser whether you may use them.
4. Ask smaller conferences that fit your topic directly for the opening or closing slot and attach references and videos.
5. Read programmes with a purpose: note who opens, what role the person has and which audience they speak to.