At VivaTech 2026 in Paris, NRJ Global partnered with HABS (Human Augmented Brain System), a French deeptech specialising in neuro-cognitive AI, to let visitors see their emotional reactions to audio content in real time. How it worked:
- Visitors, wearing a HABS Neuro AI headset, listened to tracks from across NRJ Global’s stations: NRJ’s biggest hits, Nostalgie’s 80s catalogue, Chérie FM’s 2000s playlist, and Rire & Chansons.
- HABS’s Neuro-AI technology estimated six emotional responses as visitors listened, including pleasure, surprise, engagement, curiosity, focus, and nostalgia.
- Each track produced its own “emotional signature”, displayed on screen and shareable on social media instantly.
Making emotion measurable
Radio and audio have always been seen as an emotional medium, but that claim isn’t always easy to back up with numbers. Turning listeners’ reactions into something tangible and measurable gives NRJ Global a new way to demonstrate audio’s effect on attention and engagement.
Cécile Chambaudrie, President of NRJ Global, put the wider VivaTech partnership in context:
Audio is a deeply emotional medium. With HABS, we can now measure it, analyse it and demonstrate its impact in real time. This experience offers our partners tangible proof of the power of sound, and a new way of objectively assessing audio performance.
AI as the translator, not the generator
The use of AI here is a way to prove what creative audio work can do for an audience, turning a feeling into a metric media buyers can weigh alongside reach and frequency.
In this context, AI isn’t generating the music or writing the ad copy. The creativity, the songs, the stations, the decades of audio identity NRJ Global has built, stay human. AI’s role is to make an already powerful medium measurable, to take something as intangible as a feeling and turn it into data that media owners, brands, and creatives can use.
As marketing decisions lean on measurable proof, audio has struggled to compete with the numbers that digital and other media channels can offer. Partnerships like this show a different path for AI: using it to highlight audio’s strengths, such as building emotional connections with audiences.