Well, not exactly. But for over a year, Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda has been telling his own artificial intelligence replica, “That’s not me,” over and over again, every single day, trying to teach a machine what it means to be him. The result is “ATAI” — an AI version of Toyoda that debuted at Woven City’s KAKEZAN 2026 event and promptly became the strangest thing Toyota has ever built.
The concept is simple enough. Woven by Toyota trained a large language model on Toyoda’s past speeches, interviews, and internal sessions called Akio Juku. It cloned his voice from audio samples. Then it let the 68-year-old chairman interrogate his own digital ghost, day after day, correcting its answers until they started sounding like something he would actually say.
And the thing is, it got unnervingly close.
Asked to introduce himself, the AI — called “Akio-kun” — talked about growing up surrounded by cars, his father Shoichiro bringing home different models, and the pivotal trip to Fuji Speedway that ignited a lifelong obsession. The real Toyoda talked about being born as “the third-generation heir, the kind people say will ruin the company,” and living a lonely life under the weight of that name.
Same origin story, completely different emotional register. The AI gave the Wikipedia version. The man gave the wound.
The gap kept showing up. On favorite food, Akio-kun delivered a polished monologue about bringing packaged rice and canned mackerel to the Nürburgring 24 Hours, linking his diet to his “master driver sensor” philosophy. Toyoda himself said he doesn’t like crucian carp and sea squirt. That’s it. When told the AI also avoided giving a direct answer, he laughed: “Sounds like a good guy.”
On cars, the AI cited the Crown for memories and the Yaris as his benchmark. Toyoda said he likes things that smell like gasoline, are loud, and have a wild side — the same answer he gave actor Teruyuki Kagawa at the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show, when saying such things at a time of peak EV mania was practically corporate heresy.
The exercise reveals something Toyota probably didn’t intend to put on display this nakedly. The AI is fluent, thoughtful, and articulate. It connects ideas logically and stays on message. It is, in short, a perfect corporate communicator, and that’s precisely what makes it a lousy copy of Akio Toyoda.
Toyoda built his reputation on being unpredictable, emotional, and occasionally reckless with his honesty. He couldn’t call himself “Akio Toyoda” when he started racing, so he invented Morizo. He told a Tokyo Motor Show audience he loved loud, gas-burning cars when every other executive was genuflecting before electrification.
The AI can’t replicate that because the whole point of those moments is that they carried risk. A language model optimized to sound like you will always sand off the edges that made you interesting.
Toyota frames this as a showcase for Woven City’s AI capabilities, a way for the chairman to appear at events he’s too busy to attend in person. That’s a reasonable enough use case. But the subtext of the entire conversation is more interesting than the technology itself.
When Toyoda was asked what he expects from AI and from people, the answer was embedded in the interview’s structure. The AI repeated itself, circled around questions, and delivered safe, well-constructed paragraphs. Toyoda gave two-word answers, told jokes about crucian carp, and let uncomfortable silences sit.
One of them sounded like a chairman. The other one actually is.
Toyota spent a year teaching a machine to talk like Akio Toyoda. What they proved instead is that the man’s value was never in what he said — it was in what he was willing to risk by saying it. No training data in the world can replicate that.
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