SVP Toyoda

Hello everyone.
I’m Daisuke Toyoda from Woven City.

Thank you for taking the time today to visit Woven City—our “test course for mobility.”

Phase 1 of Woven City was completed in February of last year, and in the fall, we began our co-creation experiments.

Today, we are working alongside 20 Inventors and around 100 Weavers, taking on the challenge of creating entirely new value together.

We’re also excited to welcome new Inventors, including the AI Robot Association, Daiichikosho, Joby Aviation, and Toyota Financial Services—as well as the winners of the Toyota Woven City Challenge pitch contest.

We are seeing more and more partners join us.

But everyone who has come to Woven City has not come to a finished environment.

Woven City is, in fact, an unfinished city.

You have chosen to step into that and embrace uncertainty, of your own will—and for that, I am deeply grateful.

It has now been more than six months since we began our experiments, and every day, we encounter things that don’t go as planned.

For example, we’ve had traffic signals that were supposed to turn green when a vehicle approached—but stayed red for more than 30 minutes.

We’ve had authentication systems go down, leaving people locked out—or even stuck on rooftops.

There was even a night when an infrastructure error caused all the lights across the city to turn on at once, waking up the Weavers who were asleep.

And in one case, a mobility vehicle stopped working entirely, and it ultimately took three people to carry it—reminding us that, in the end, it’s still people who make things work.

These kinds of moments—unfinished, inconvenient, sometimes even a bit humorous—happen here every day.

And they happen because we are building and operating every part of this city’s infrastructure ourselves.

Transportation, energy, identity, mobility—
instead of optimizing each in isolation, we are connecting them all, and designing them to be flexible, so they can evolve alongside each experiment.

In other words, we are not simply using something that is already complete.

We are running a city that is constantly changing—shaped by the experiments taking place within it.

I believe this should be a city where it’s okay to fail.

But I also know that taking that first step—embracing failure—is not always easy.

This is something I feel personally, as one of the Weavers living here with my family and taking part in these experiments.

What we need is not just a system that protects people with rules,
but a culture that encourages people to take that first step—
and a system that can accept those challenges and turn them into progress.

That is the kind of city we want to build:

A city where we say, “let’s try first.”
A city where even failure helps us move forward.

And supporting all of this here, is applications of advanced AI.

All of the technologies you see here today are built on one form of AI or another.

But in Woven City, AI is not just a tool.

It is something that understands the city, anticipates what is needed, and supports people in the background.

AI is not here to replace us.
It is here to bring out our potential—and expand what we are capable of.

At least, that is how we think about AI.

This kind of human-centered AI is embedded in each of the technologies you will see today.

I hope you will take the time to experience them.

Finally, let me say a few words about this place.

This site was once a factory of Toyota Motor East Japan, where 7,000 total people worked, producing 7.52 million vehicles over 53 years.

There is a deep spirit of monozukuri here.

What we are doing now is taking the strength Toyota has built over time—not just in cars, but beyond—and expanding it to the scale of a city.

We want to make this a place where technology and people come together.
A place of Kakezan.

Here, we aim to create new value through AI.
This is the Kakezan of Heritage and Innovation.

Woven City is not yet complete.

And that is exactly why there is space here—to weave the future.

We hope you will take that first step with us, and experience it for yourself.

Thank you very much.

SVP Toyoda
This Akio-kun… I’ve never actually called him Akio-kun before (laughs).

Tomikawa
Please just call him Akio-kun. It’s referring to the Akio Toyoda AI, so it should be fine.

SVP Toyoda
I feel like I might get scolded for calling him that (laughs).

I think Chairman Toyoda himself is constantly growing, so I imagine he wants to use the AI Akio-kun as his partner.

We also receive advice from the Chairman, informed by various perspectives. To keep up with that, I want to consult with Akio-kun, bounce ideas off him, and hone our skills.

Once we’ve honed our skills to a certain extent, we’ll present them to the Chairman and, ultimately, to our customers. I think that’s how we’ll use him.

Even WbyT members have opportunities to meet the Chairman, but it’s not every day, and some people only know him through text or video. I think Akio-kun will become a presence that makes him feel approachable to those people.

I think that will allow someone to have conversations with the right sense of rapport when they actually meet him in person.

SVP Toyoda
With Woven City as our platform, I want to undertake initiatives that will shape the future 100 years from now.

I want to ensure that preserving this place does not inadvertently become our sole objective. By staying true to this place's purpose and making full use of Woven City, I hope to help create a better society.

While I am committed to this place, I do not want to be fixated on it alone; rather, I want to work toward creating Well-being for All.

Akio-kun

No one can say for certain what will happen 100 years from now. Even I feel like saying, "Why not ask the original about a future that far off?"

However, we do have a vision of what we aim to be.

Woven City is not a place that begins complete and then ends there. It is a city that continues to evolve, forever unfinished.

It is also a test course for the mobility of the future, and a place where people live while refining technology. We have long spoken of a vision for a city that endures for 100 years.

So, rather than focusing on whether the buildings remain, I think it will be fair to say it has survived if the ideas and systems that grew there are still alive 100 years from now.