Le Printemps des Études is where France’s research, data and insights profession meets once a year. The 14th edition, subtitled the Client Intelligence & Strategy Summit, took place on 24 and 25 September 2026 at the Palais des Congrès de Paris, at Porte Maillot. Quiet Quotient went as a visitor on Thursday 24 September.
This is our report: what the event is, who we talked to, what we noticed on the floor, and what we took back to Dijon.
What Le Printemps des Études is
Despite its name, which means “Spring of Studies”, the event now takes place in late September. It began in April 2012, created by professionals from the communications, marketing and survey industries, and has grown into the profession’s yearly reference: exhibitions, conferences, meetings, testimonials and benchmark workshops in one place, for the people who buy, run and use research. The 2026 edition opened at 9 am on both days.
Our day at the Palais des Congrès
We spent Thursday at the Palais des Congrès as visitors. We did not speak. We came to listen, to compare, and to talk with people whose work we follow. The room was international, with French companies alongside Belgian, American and other international ones.
We had a conversation with a partner at an insights consultancy whose work we admire, and a long one with two members of the Talkwalker team about the new features and options of their platform. Conversations like these are the part of a trade show you can’t get from a program.
AI on the show floor
AI was everywhere. Several stands built their pitch around AI tools for running research faster. Tools keep getting better at collecting and sorting what people post, which is what social listening platforms do. That is real progress, and we use AI in our own work. But speed isn’t understanding. Someone still has to work out what a pattern means, and what people are no longer saying.
What no stand could show us
Most of the tools on the floor collect what people post. But people are posting less, and talking less. A study published in March 2026 in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that the average number of words people speak in a day fell by about 338 every year between 2005 and 2019, roughly 28% over 14 years. That study measures speech, not posts. The direction, though, matches what Ofcom found in its latest survey of UK adults: only about half still actively post on social media.
Our view is that a lot of the conversation has moved to places most tools don’t look: private groups, forums, direct messages. More posts collected doesn’t make a better answer if the people you need to hear have stopped posting. We wrote more about this in Why Your Customers Went Quiet (And Where They’re Still Talking).
What we took back to Dijon
Three things. First, collecting and sorting text is getting cheaper every year, and interpretation isn’t. Second, the biggest blind spot in customer research is the people who went quiet: a dashboard shows what is loud, and it can’t show who stopped talking or why. Third, a finding is only useful if it ends in something a team can do this quarter.
Talk to us
Working on a question about customers who have gone quiet? Read how we work on our Method page, or start with a Cultural Signal Check. Let’s talk.
Also this week: CONNECT 2026 in Talant (Dijon): our field report
About Quiet Quotient: We are a research consultancy based in Dijon. We study what customers say when nobody is asking, and what they leave out, and turn it into decisions a team can act on.
