Innovation Spectacles: How Mega Expositions Communicate AI Futures and Create Asian Technology Hubs
By President’s Professor Pauline Hope Cheong, Ph.D.
Innovation is often understood as the development of novel products, systems, and technical capabilities. Yet innovation is equally about the stories societies tell about technological change. It involves creating compelling narratives that shape how new technologies are imagined, experienced, and valued, as well as the places associated with them.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly expanded into countless digital and physical applications. As global competition over AI intensifies, however, the race for leadership is no longer defined solely by scientific breakthroughs or technical performance. It is increasingly about who can present the most persuasive vision of the future where people want to live, work, and invest.
Over the past year, including this summer, I have seen firsthand how large-scale technology expositions across Asia transform cities into stages for these future-oriented narratives. Participating in these events revealed how carefully choreographed media, immersive exhibitions, and large-scale public engagement work together to construct innovation hubs. These mega expositions function as innovation spectacles: orchestrated performances that translate technological ambition into public experience, making AI visible, tangible, and affectively compelling. In doing so, they become stages on which nations communicate digital sovereignty, innovation capacity and global relevance.
Building Future Lives through the World Exposition, Japan
An invitation from the laboratory of renowned roboticist Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro for me to visit the Future of Life Pavilion at the World Expo 2025 in Osaka offered a striking demonstration of embodied AI through social robots and intelligent infrastructure.
The pavilion featured numerous interactive, life-sized androids embedded within an intergenerational narrative centered on a grandson and his grandmother living alongside AI companions. Visitors moved through immersive environments where androids participated in learning, work, and everyday household activities, presenting AI as a familiar presence within recognizable social and family settings. This vision of normalized human–AI coexistence extended beyond the exhibition itself. The pavilion's distinctive black façade incorporated "living walls" of continuously recirculating water that provided zero-energy cooling to mitigate urban heat, illustrating the integration of intelligent design and sustainability interests.
By weaving together robotics, architecture, and environmental design into an aesthetically harmonious experience, the pavilion staged a vision of future human–machine coexistence. It reinforced Japan's longstanding identity as a nation where technological innovation is not positioned as disruptive, but as an extension of cultural continuity and social harmony.
This vision resonated with the Expo's overarching theme, Designing Future Society for Our Lives, which situated AI within a broader narrative about humanity's future. Spanning 155 hectares on the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay and symbolically encircled by “the Grand Ring”, the world's largest wooden architectural structure, this Expo integrated AI with healthcare, sustainability, and human well-being across all eight of Japan's signature pavilions.
In this sense, the Expo with more than 180 pavilions representing 158 countries and international entities, did far more than showcase the latest technological advances. It communicated a distinctive regional vision of innovation, positioning Japan as a global hub for human-centered, sustainable, and technologically integrated futures.
Staging Innovation leadership through Super AI performances
The recent SuperAI conference in Singapore similarly demonstrated how mega technology events actively produce innovation. As Asia's largest AI conference, SuperAI attracted more than 10,000 attendees and 1,500 AI companies from over 150 countries. More importantly, it anchored Singapore AI Week (8–14 June 2026), a city-wide program of more than 100 workshops, hackathons, demo days, investor roundtables, and networking events hosted by leading organizations including OpenAI, Alibaba Cloud, Stripe, and SparkLabs.
Throughout the week, I observed how innovation was performed as much as it was presented. Celebrity CEOs delivered keynote speeches that inspired confidence by intertwining technological optimism with stories of personal entrepreneurship and success. Startup founders pitched new AI applications before panels of investors and judges, while influential technology journalists, researchers, venture capitalists, and industry leaders framed discussions around the next AI frontiers. Together, these performances transformed technical advances into attractive narratives about the future.
Notably, multiple phrases were echoed repeatedly throughout the conference, including this refrain: "Agentic AI is here." Although the practical capabilities of autonomous AI agents remain uneven and continue to evolve, the declaration itself functioned as a powerful act of innovation communication. My research related to digital culture and religion suggests that when phrases are repeated like mantras, they do more than describe reality, they help bring it into being. Recycled across keynote stages, panel discussions, product demonstrations, and exhibition halls illuminated by giant LED screens, these declarations acquire a distinctive performative force, cultivating a shared sense that the next wave of AI has already arrived.
Consequently, these performances work beyond the promotion of individual companies. With millions of dollars in startup prizes and venture capital circulating throughout the event, SuperAI projected Singapore as the place where global AI conversations take place, entrepreneurial opportunities emerge, and the future of AI is being shaped. The conference thus reinforced Singapore's carefully cultivated reputation as a trusted, globally connected innovation hub. This image aligns closely with the country's consistent position among the world's top ten economies
in the Global Innovation Index, illustrating how mega technology events operate not only as economic catalysts but also as instruments of nation branding and soft power.
Communicating AI Futures
As competition over AI leadership intensifies, mega expositions are becoming strategic instruments of innovation communication and power. They shape how nations are perceived, attract talent and investment, and influence global conversations about what an AI-enabled future should look like. In doing so, they are exhibiting technology and more. Through multimodal communication, immersive storytelling, and carefully curated experiences, they position Asian cities and nations as innovation hubs where visitors can see, interact with, and imagine AI prospects firsthand.
While the World Expo in Japan presented AI as a vision of harmonious human futures, Singapore staged AI as an engine of entrepreneurial ambition and global connectivity. Together, these mega expositions reveal that innovation leadership is communicated not only through technological capability, but through carefully orchestrated performances that make particular futures appear credible, desirable, and already underway.
My research on communication, technology, and culture underscore how the relations between communication, technology, and futures are vital and co-constitutive. I also teach classes on communication ethics, civic engagement and global leadership in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at ASU. Communication does not merely represent innovation; it constructs and animates it, giving technological futures social meaning, public legitimacy, and collective momentum. In the global race for AI leadership, the futures that endure may belong not only to those who invent them, but to those who can bring them vividly to life and invite others to inhabit them before they wholly exist.