Hongwei Liu is in the business of location and ambulation. On Thursday afternoon, his place is the floor of a tech conference très grande à Paris and he’s feeling all the walking and standing. “My feet hurt,” he said. “I used to do this all the time.”

Liu’s company, Waterloo, Ont.-based MappedIn, is one of 60 in the Canadian business delegation at VivaTech, a four-day European expo. The mission positions Canada as “a leader in tech and in AI,” said Isabelle Turcotte, vice-president of ecosystem relations at Scale AI, the Montreal-headquartered cluster that organized it. The federally funded innovation organization is reimbursing delegation firms for some travel costs.

MappedIn needs no introduction to, or in, Europe. Its technology for indoor directions and directories is used, in Liu’s estimation, in about a third of the world’s malls and a lot of Fortune 500 office towers. Continental clients include Klepierre, which has 39 French centres commercial. At VivaTech, Liu is calling on nearby customers and partners. “The meetings we’ve set up around the show are as valuable as the random collisions at the show,” he said. 

With location increasingly important, Liu has also scouted potential partners who could support MappedIn’s clients in the region. “It seems like deglobalization is here to stay,” he said. “A large French customer is going to want to know that we have a French presence.” 

Alexander Jacquet, CEO of Trusting Pixels, doesn’t yet have clients, so VivaTech is a way to get the word out in a place he expects will offer big opportunities. His Vancouver-based company plans to sell its SaaS platform to consumer-protection authorities and groups to detect whether images and videos of people have been retouched. “Europe is actually leading the way,” he said. “There’s a lot of action toward protecting consumers from fake content [in] advertisements.”

Among the hands Jacquet says he’s shaken in Paris is Emmanuel Macron’s, at a Tuesday-night reception at the French president’s palace. “Which was really, really cool.” Other headliners at VivaTech include Elon Musk—Tesla’s booth is opposite Scale AI’s; LVMH’s Bernard Arnault; Meta’s Yann LeCun; and Montreal’s very own Yoshua Bengio. 

French leaders in both the public and private sectors have been receptive to the larger message of Canada’s AI prowess, according to Turcotte. “Each of them have been telling us [that] it’s the right moment.” On Tuesday, Macron pledged billions of euros for AI, including €400 million ($592 million) to support nine new clusters focused on the technology. France is also scheduled to host the next of the international AI summit series in February, after Korea and the U.K. 

Scale AI staff at VivaTech have been inviting officials to a September event between the two Parisian shows: All In, the Montreal AI conference of which Turcotte is founder and CEO. The French summit organizers are “very familiar with the AI aspects related to ethics and safety,” she said. “They haven’t addressed much of the AI for business.” Canada, she says, has expertise to share.