Wiliot

Wiliot is transforming manufacturing, distribution, and product use by using ambient Internet of Things (IoT) technology to enable products to continuously collect data about the world around them – where they are, who is using them, the air temperature, when they need replenishing – providing real-time awareness throughout the supply chain.

CEO Tal Tamir spoke to us about how Wiliot delivers better quality produce and reduced waste at lower cost for producers, suppliers, retailers, and consumers, and how their current AI-enabled solutions will eventually provide products on-demand.

What was the vision behind Wiliot?

I always understood IoT as being less about connecting smart devices to each other and more about digitizing the physical world.

We invented a smart tag device to generate real-world data – sensing things like light temperature, location, humidity. It’s small and low-cost enough to be disposable. It sticks onto practically anything and needs no battery because it’s powered by harvesting radio frequency energy.

We access the data by ‘crowdsourcing’ existing components – anything from a phone in an employee’s pocket, to a forklift moving pallets, to a conveyor belt – which come together to form our network.

And at the heart of the solution is a powerful AI-enabled platform that understands what the data is telling us in real time and can learn from that data over time, recognizing trends, events, and exceptions.

We call this ambient IoT because it enables a world where the things that surround us, food, medicine, any product, can sense the environment and talk in real time to the cloud via the radios that are already present in appliances, smart products and mobile devices that surround us.

Your company mission is “to make every single thing an agent of change.” Can you explain a bit more about that?

We have sensors attached to millions of products and packages in the physical world that are connected through an affordable ambient network that talks to our data platform and allows us to understand what is happening where and what that means for your business.

Imagine something as ordinary as a case of bananas as it travels from the supplier to the distribution center to the grocery store. Along the way it sees a lot. It sees things that are part of a normal pattern and things that are not. It sees mistakes and inefficiencies: incorrect routing, truck doors being left open, temperature fluctuations, you name it.

By being digitized and connected to a smart platform, the case of bananas is an agent of change because it can trigger an alert to fix something, for example, by informing the driver of a delivery at the wrong location. The package is transmitting data about the world around it and enabling problems to be solved in real time as it goes. And all the packages together are enabling the development of larger scale solutions to bigger issues such as minimizing waste or cutting carbon emissions.

What is the role of AI in all of this?

It felt to us that the entire industry was crowded around places where data already exists and can be easily accessed – digital processes, financial flows, and the like which are just the tip of the iceberg.

At the end of the day, you have enough computational power to do good things and innovate, but you're limited because the data that is available to you defines what you work on.

But once we can digitize objects in the physical world and make that data available, you have vast space for AI to work. Imagine that collective brain optimizing deliveries, routing, energy flows, supply and demand – helping us to be efficient in ways that we don't even fully comprehend yet.

Once you have full visibility, things will improve across all metrics and for all people. It’s not a case of a trade-off here. We can reduce cost and waste and improve quality and availability at the same time.

What benefits should we expect to see as consumers?

We all live in both a physical world and a digital world and currently there's such a gap between the efficiencies that we see in digital compared to the physical. But once we can sense the physical world and have complete visibility of that data then there’s no reason it can’t follow the same steps as what the internet is doing in the digital world.

Once we all got connected online, we reduced waste and improved quality. Today you open any screen and it’s fully personalized. You get recommendations for what you should listen to. You have no need to buy or rent or store lots of DVDs that you may never watch. And the same will happen in the physical world.

If I want to eat a salad on a Tuesday, behind the scenes there are multiple entities that need to store too much because they don't know what you want and when. They forward food and waste it. Send it, store it, waste it. And then you go to the store, you buy twice what you need, and you throw half of it away. So, you need a garbage bin and a waste disposal system and trucks riding blindly emptying garbage bins. And all through this process is waste and inefficiency.

Once you have full visibility and personalization, you'll get your salad when you want it with fresh ingredients, exactly to your requirements. And there's no reason to have any waste.

All kinds of local neighborhood food caching systems will be built to provide what you need based on your consumption on a Tuesday night and the last mile becomes something much shorter and immediate. That will happen once we have visibility on the data, but that is just the first phase.

What do you see happening in the next phase?

What happened on the internet next was that the line between content providers and content consumers blurred. Today we're all content providers and content consumers. It's a peer network. We provide data and we receive data.

And the same will happen in the physical world. We will move from an upstream-downstream situation to a peer network. It's no longer a supply chain, it's purely based on demand prediction. Today, when I stream some media on the internet, it's not that it is directly downloaded from the provider of that content. It’s already there and cached. And once that happens, there's no waste. Or very minimal waste. And there’s no specific industry that needs to deal with it.

Large suppliers will fragment and maybe you want your salad from a specific field that grows specific stuff. Why not? When you consume data today, you consume exactly what you want. There are no aggregators of data that you need. You go directly to the source.

So, imagine hundreds of thousands of producers and suppliers that need to connect to millions and billions of people. I think that the winners on the retail grocery side will be those that become data providers.

They won’t need to move masses of stuff around. They’ll have an intimate relationship with the customer. They can be Netflix of food or of retail products. They understand what you need. And they’ll have a vast supply of networks. And they know what they can supply and who supplies what, and it will grow once you have data.

The function of the modern retailer will be to provide data to everyone to route things correctly so it will become a platform play instead of just shelves and shelves of things half of which are going to waste.

Once that happens, basically, it's like we'll be able to have direct products more or less on demand. With minimal waste and much improved quality and lower cost.

I can’t tell you when it will happen, but it will because it provides benefit to consumers, more opportunities for producers and suppliers and a huge opportunity for the retailers that can connect all this together.

And this will not be the end state because as, on top of all of this, we will have more new and richer data to work with. And we can learn from this data and unleash our AI, analyze and process it, and then develop and create new emergent opportunities that are still unknown to us today.