What we're listening for at the Salon des Maires 2026

From November 24 to 26, French local government will gather at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles for the Salon des Maires et des Collectivités Locales, the country's largest gathering of territorial decision-makers. The 2025 edition brought together 1,380 exhibitors and 65,672 visitors, including some 21,000 mayors and 21,000 territorial executives.

The 2026 edition lands right after the March municipal elections, with a new generation of mayors and municipal teams, many of them selecting vendors for the first time. For anyone tracking how French local government buys and adopts software, it is the primary signal source of the year.

For our team, the Salon is a field checkpoint for our B2G GovTech coverage. We are not attending to present: we are going to listen, test our existing market views against what vendors and buyers actually say, and capture the signals that do not show up in reports.

What we're watching

• Core software in a replacement-driven market. What is actually triggering re-platforming decisions today (pricing, service quality, feature gaps, or the consolidation of a legacy vendor), versus what vendors claim is driving them?
• Incumbents and AI. Leading platform vendors are developing specific AI use cases, which is a natural argument to move communes from legacy on-prem deployments to the vendor's own cloud. Is AI the real pitch, or the entry point for a cloud migration?
• Decision-makers' sentiment. What pushes mayors and municipal executives to switch systems, where do current platforms fall short, and how much appetite or resistance is there for AI features?

How we'll capture it

Through direct conversations on the floor with vendors, mayors and municipal executives. The sentiment and takeaways we collect will feed our GovTech research and the Dedale platform.

Explore our research

• AI in GovTech: A Low-Disruption Market Where Incumbents Hold the Advantage
• AI in GovTech report

On-site at the Salon des Maires 2026

Our Govtech Thematic Lead, Lionel Ren, will be attending the Salon and speaking with software vendors, mayors and municipal executives.

If you are attending and have a view on where French GovTech is heading, whether on platforms, AI or how local government buys software, we would be glad to hear it. Reach out on LinkedIn to exchange directly on-site.