Walmart Goes Full Steam Ahead on Wiliot, Highlighting Convergence of Visibility Technologies

At the beginning of October, Wiliot made public its collaboration with Walmart. Pilots and experiments have been ongoing for a number of years in something of an open secret, but the announcement marks the commencement of a widespread rollout of Wiliot’s technology across Walmart’s U.S. footprint.

Specifically, the collaboration will see Wiliot deploy its Radio Frequency (RF)-powered Pixels—low-cost, battery-free, Bluetooth® sensors—across 90 million Walmart pallets by the end of 2026. Additionally, a private instance of Wiliot’s Cloud will power the deployment, acting as the location and sensing engine that processes and analyzes data to feed into Walmart’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. In its press release, Wiliot notes that it is currently deployed in 500 Walmart locations, with plans to cover 4,600 stores and 40 Distribution Centers. The rollout initiated in Texas, which was the home of Walmart’s Innovation Center until its closure in 2024, and will continue on a regional basis to cover the entire U.S. footprint. The deployment will cover Walmart’s broad retail estate, consisting of supercenters and neighborhood markets, as well as Sam’s Club membership warehouse locations.

This is the largest public deployment of Ambient IoT—the Internet of Things (IoT) powered by energy harvesting technologies—and the second largest overall after the other open secret project with a major online retailer (Amazon). The Walmart deployment will be entirely powered by the company’s battery-free Pixels; ABI Research estimates that approximately 200 million tags will be used to power this rollout. Compared to 2023, already a large growth year for Wiliot, in which around 100 million tags were shipped, there is a clear step-change in accepting Wiliot’s technology. Walmart’s public announcement is itself a vote of confidence in the Wiliot end-to-end solution, and the deployment will continue to expand over the coming years.

This is by no means Walmart’s only investment in its supply chain. The retailer is pursuing multiple initiatives, in particular expanding omnichannel/eCommerce sales, expanding margins in existing and new business areas, and “data monetization” through Scintilla (previously Walmart Luminate)—using data points that include sales figures, inventory levels, and shopping patterns to identify and recommend opportunities to sell new products to Walmart customers. Walmart has invested heavily in data capture, automation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools across its supply chain. Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) across its business has correspondingly increased 218% between Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 and FY 2025, from US$11 billion to US$24 billion, respectively.

In this grand scheme, Walmart’s announced investment in Ambient IoT is a drop in the ocean—estimated at around US$20 million for tags, US$20 million to US$30 million in recurring software expenditure, and a further US$10 million on infrastructure—but its outsized impact during Proof of Value (PoV) trials on operational metrics, including product turns and condition, will make it a critical foundational investment in Walmart’s data infrastructure.

This Ambient IoT investment will complement Walmart’s investment in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), where the retailer’s rollout on an item level across product categories continues at a strong pace. Wiliot’s capabilities provide an additional layer of value compared to RFID, in particular with its sensing capabilities and more frequent reading with existing Bluetooth® infrastructure. In particular for fresh products or grocery, where RFID is difficult to justify at an item level, Wiliot’s IoT Pixels on pallets will provide greater visibility for product movements and condition, allowing Walmart to apply its AI and analytics tools to optimize inventory turns, product condition, and markdowns.

Wiliot’s own offering is its software: tags are manufactured under license by third-parties, as discussed further below. Wiliot’s Cloud aggregates and processes all data from its IoT Pixels, acting as the sensing and intelligence engine to feed Walmart’s systems. Crucially, Wiliot is increasingly data agnostic: it can ingest data not only from its IoT Pixels, but also from any IoT, RFID, or other data sources to provide contextual decisions. This is in line with a model that is increasingly emerging in supply chain visibility, where platforms act as the visibility engine and orchestration layer; similarly, Roambee’s rebrand to Decklar highlights its exit from the “IoT space” proper to focus on being a software engine.

This is incontrovertibly where value is created in the “visibility” market, and is a model on which suppliers from different backgrounds are converging. RFID software providers Nedap, Checkpoint, and Sensormatic are also increasing the types of data they ingest, enhancing RFID signals with, for instance, IoT or vision systems. Real-time transportation visibility providers project44, Overhaul, and FourKites are going in a similar direction, increasing the amount of data they gather from IoT devices. Clearly, the visibility market is experiencing convergence: IoT, RFID, telematics, and other systems, all previously deployed as point solutions, will increasingly be seen in a single platform. In turn, this platform will become a de facto system of reference for inventory and supply chain data, where the competitive differentiator will be around data management and orchestration.

There is another interesting aspect to the Wiliot and Walmart announcement. In what seems in retrospect a clear precursor to the announcement, Wiliot announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with Avery Dennison in mid-September. This partnership, first launched in 2022, focused heavily on expanding manufacturing capabilities for Wiliot’s second-generation tags, as well as limited integration between Wiliot’s sensing cloud and Avery Dennison’s atma.io product cloud platform. Today, Wiliot has been testing its third-generation tags with key customers for over a year, with production at scale and general release likely at the end of 2025. Additionally, the partnership expansion with Avery Dennison in September focuses heavily on full integration, with Avery Dennison “fully integrating Wiliot’s solutions into its Intelligent Labels portfolio and its connected product cloud atma.io.” This is noteworthy.

RFID inlay and tag vendors increasingly see Bluetooth® labels, including Wiliot’s IoT Pixels, as a crucial part of their portfolio. Other key inlay companies, such as Identiv, Tageos, and Beontag, have all announced products, or intentions to deepen their portfolio, with Bluetooth® labels as they look to expand their printable label platforms. Bluetooth® labels are clearly a new Intellectual Property (IP) battleground, as demonstrated most strikingly by Trackonomy’s acquisition in September of InPlay, one of the largest manufacturers of Bluetooth® chips designed specifically for smart labels—complementing Trackonomy’s own Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and its label portfolio. A horizontal label technology offering consisting of multiple technology protocols, with data aggregated and processed in a single cloud, is the direction in which the supply chain visibility market has been moving for a while, and the way large deployments are currently scaling.

There is additional synergy between Avery Dennison’s atma.io platform and Wiliot’s Cloud. atma.io manages product identifiers throughout their lifecycles through barcodes, QR codes, and RFID tags, while Wiliot does so for its Bluetooth® tags. Wiliot further complements this with its cloud intelligence that processes data and provides sensor-based insights. Avery Dennison is also looking further toward software; in November 2024, it launched Optica—complementing atma.io with “full-service” applications. In addition to deepening its partnership with Wiliot, Avery Dennison has also developed a particularly close relationship with another RFID software vendor, RIOT Insight, providing applications for in-store inventory management.

Given the increasing importance of a broader label portfolio and the growing focus on software engines for data processing and insights, it is not out of the realm of possibility that an acquisition of Wiliot by Avery Dennison will be forthcoming. It could be a missed opportunity if not. Avery Dennison is one of the few companies with the resources to carry out such a move, and this would only deepen its existing relationship with Walmart, for whose RFID mandate it is already a major supplier of labels. Indeed, Walmart’s vote of confidence in Wiliot’s technology as a long-term foundational technology for its supply chain could be justified by an expectation that Wiliot’s future and investment will be secured by being rolled up into Avery Dennison—a much larger company and important partner.

The convergence of technologies for supply chain visibility has been coming for many years. It is a sign of the maturity of the individual point solutions and of investments in supply chain technologies as a whole that the convergence is happening now. To a great extent, the opportunities created by AI are a catalyst for this change, with suppliers wanting to create a labeled data layer that can easily be analyzed and queried by Large Language Models (LLMs) and other tools. The need for new data systems that support real-time data that can be queried by AI tools is driving the emergence of broad-based visibility engines that manage and orchestrate data—a role for which behemoth Information Technology (IT) systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are not suited.

This convergence marks a fork in the road; visibility vendors must take note of these events and decide how their products and models will have to evolve accordingly. It is highly unlikely in 10 years’ time that point solutions will exist in the form they do today: RFID inventory platforms, real-time transportation visibility platforms, IoT visibility providers, and a number of others will converge, with competitive differentiators being the number and quality of their sources of data, and the quality of their data management, orchestration, and insights. Not only must visibility vendors pay attention: enterprise systems like ERP or Transportation Management Systems (TMSs) risk having their functionality eroded by the emergence of this new category.

Still, we are at the beginning of this convergence, in which today primarily giants are showing the way—such as UPS with Trackonomy, or Walmart with Wiliot. One of the key questions for technology suppliers is how to enable not only giants, but also mid-market and smaller enterprises to be successful. Large companies have big IT budgets, existing partner ecosystems to manage installations and troubleshooting, and the time and resources to experiment with innovative solutions. This is less true for mid-market companies. To move this market forward, visibility suppliers should look to identify the best partners with whom to go to market—for installation, software deployment, and ongoing relationship management.