What Does It Mean for NTT to Participate in Expo 2025?

The World Expo is a platform for countries to share their respective achievements and cultures. It has been the showcase for groundbreaking inventions and architectural innovations and has helped to promote international dialogue and collaboration during the more than 170 years since London’s Great Exhibition of 1851.

Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan will be held between April and October next year, with the theme "Designing Future Society for Our Lives." As you’d expect, NTT will be one of Japan’s major contributors to Expo 2025.

For NTT, Expo 2025 is both a huge investment and a great responsibility. But more than that, it’s a wonderful opportunity to show what the Group can do for the world during a period of rapid technological and social change. We spoke to three colleagues about their excitement and hopes for next year.

Rika Nakazawa, Group Vice President, Connected Industry & Head of Sustainability for Americas

In 1970, NTT participated in the World Expo held in Osaka, astonishing visitors with the marvels of a wireless phone and video-calling technologies. Already a significant and large enterprise at the time, 55 years later NTT has grown to encompass 340,000+ global innovators across communications, digital infrastructure, and industry transformations, championing new possibilities in sustainable AI models (tsuzumi) and computing infrastructure (IOWN and the All-Photonic Network paradigm).

Expo 2025 will provide an extraordinary stage for the diverse and brilliant teams across NTT Group to showcase the impact of our $3.5B+ annual R&D investments alongside industry and customer co-innovation initiatives that advance and foster sustainable societies, industries, businesses, and the planet. While the 1970 World Expo theme was “Progress and Harmony for Mankind,” the Expo 2025 theme of “Designing Future Society for Our Lives” invites NTT employees, our partners and our communities to co-create a future that fully harnesses both human ingenuity with new technology paradigms. Expo 2025 will be a thrilling moment in our rich history of societal and ecological stewardship, and catalyze the next generation of remarkable change.

Kana Umezu, Senior Manager, R&D Marketing Division NTT

Expo 2025 is obviously very important as a showcase for future technology like IOWN.

Fundamentally, what is technology for? I don't think anyone would deny that it should be used to solve social problems, but from the time of the last Expo in 1970, social problems have become more complex and diverse, and it is not possible to solve them simply by using even cutting-edge technology.

Solving one problem, such as the innovation of generative AI, can then also lead to other new problems, with different challenges.

NTT has been aiming to promote initiatives for a sustainable society by achieving both "growth as a company" and "solving social issues." I believe that participating in Expo 2025 is a wonderful opportunity for all of us NTT Group employees to think again about how to deal with social issues.

As an NTT Virtual Pavilion producer, I hope that all generations, include everyone who can’t make it in person to visit Osaka, enjoy our contents. The Pavilion will be the place to share NTT’s philosophy with the world.

Koichi Sato, Director, R&D Marketing Division, NTT

As an employee of a company that supports Japan's information and communication infrastructure through the research and development of cutting-edge technology, I see the upcoming World Expo as an unparalleled opportunity to promote NTT's innovative and sustainable initiatives to a global audience. With this in mind, we have prepared a proposal for the NTT Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan.

NTT aims to showcase to children around the world ways of communicating in future societies that no one has ever imagined. We want not only those who can visit the venue, but also those who can’t be there in person, to experience this new future. At the Expo 2025, NTT is taking on various challenges centered around our Pavilion exhibit, including the IOWN All Photonics Network, a virtual Expo platform created with VR, and a personal agent that recommends customized Expo experiences to visitors.

Surpassing the new "telephone" concept demonstrated at the 1970 Osaka Expo, we aim to make the Expo 2025 one that shows a future brimming with dreams and hopes, themed around new forms of "communication."