What if your package could talk? Imagine the story it would tell about its supply chain journey, including handling and transport conditions, carbon footprint, and even the state of the product inside the package. Today, technology is available to make “talking packages” a retail reality, and Wiliot, an ambient IoT data carrier, is making it happen.
Unlike an RFID system that requires dedicated readers, ambient IoT harvests energy from the radio waves generated by everyday devices like smartphones and tablets. It then uses this energy to communicate with other devices or applications.
According to Gartner, ambient IoT is one of the technologies that will play a significant role in the future of digital organizations by enabling new ecosystems, new business models based on knowing the location or behavior of objects, smarter products with new behaviors, and a much lower cost of tracking and monitoring.
Understanding its potential, Wiliot is taking its ambient IoT platform a step further by integrating natural-language technology with its IoT Pixels which are stamp-sized, battery-free smart tags that can be affixed to products, packaging, containers, crates, pallets, and more. Communicating via Bluetooth, these IoT Pixels provide information such as location, temperature, humidity, and carbon footprint to the Wiliot cloud where the data is analyzed.
Last week, Wiliot expanded the breadth of this offering by announcing the launch of WiliBot, a generative AI (GenAI) chatbot that enables natural-language conversations with any ambient IoT-connected product. When GenAI is combined with this source of real-time ambient physical world data, manufacturers, warehouses, retailers, and eventually consumers, can have important conversations with the products they make, source, distribute, and ultimately purchase.
Where have you been?
According to the company, with WiliBot, individuals can converse with products and supply chains using a smartphone to ask specific questions such as: What’s the shelf life of this product? How did it get to the store? Which product should I stock next, and why? Is this product safe to stock, and why? What is the carbon footprint of this product, and why is it so low or so high?
“Ambient IoT and generative AI are increasingly symbiotic technologies,” explained Wiliot CEO Tal Tamir. “Ambient IoT generates vast amounts of data about trillions of everyday things, and GenAI can uniquely make sense of all that data. On the flip side, GenAI learns by analyzing vast amounts of data. To a real extent, that data has so far been finite, but ambient IoT presents massive new physical world datasets that a GenAI platform like WiliBot — and others — can use to describe products, materials, supply chains, and everything connected to the internet.”
For example, the Wiliot-developed AI and machine-learning algorithms can identify supply chain events — such as sensing that shipments of produce or pharmaceuticals have been handled at unsafe temperatures — and automatically generate alerts or AI responses that allow businesses to course-correct or optimize operations.
According to Wiliot, the importance of the linkage between ambient IoT and AI was revealed during recent projects with leading food retailers. In the projects, the Wiliot Ambient Data Platform revealed that food shrink (food that is lost, damaged, or spoiled before it reaches store shelves) accounts for roughly 5% of goods in the food chain.
The Wiliot platform can solve two-thirds of these food shrink issues, the company said, ensuring a safer food supply, higher customer satisfaction, and lower costs. And WiliBot will now democratize access to these insights across the organization.
“Although Wiliot’s work in generative AI is relatively recent, the company has long been a pioneer in artificial intelligence and machine learning for deriving insights into ambient IoT data,” Tamir said. “As more companies have begun rolling out Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform, we’ve been asked how GenAI capabilities might make the transformation even easier. Our answer is WiliBot, the real-world combination of ambient IoT and AI.”
Timeline for testing the technology
Wiliot is piloting WiliBot with its key enterprise customers with a broader rollout scheduled for late 2024 and into 2025.
In the future, this convergence of ambient IoT and generative AI will be made available to consumers in-store and at home through an ecosystem of mobile apps enabling consumers to converse with their products. The ability for the package or product to “talk” will provide more insight and understanding of the overall carbon footprint, materials composition, ethical sourcing compliance, quality and safety, and more, the company said.
Watch the WiliBot demo:
