SAN DIEGO – Warehouse workers soon will have a new way of telling whether a product is fresh or had an issue while being shipped.
The worker will just ask the product.
WiliBot, the newest release from the San Diego company Wiliot, is a generative AI chatbot that can respond to verbal conversations, allowing a worker to learn about the condition of any one product as well as similar products shipped from the same company.
The company already offers a similar service that can reveal product information through an adhesive tag, or an ambient IoT (Internet of Things) pixel in the company’s terms, that are attached to packages.
Director, Technical Marketing
Wiliot
The Wilibot takes the technology to another level, said Wiliot Director of Technical Marketing Eric Casavant.
“The pixels provide a low-level data, basically just temperature inputs from one single pixel,” he said. “This AI is able to see data from all pixels, and then derive real insights from that data. So it’s a layer of intelligence on top of that low-level tag data.”
In an online video, Casavant can be seen on YouTube demonstrating the technology in a warehouse.
“This tiny little sticker is actually a full-blown computer that’s constantly measuring handling conditions and streaming that data to the cloud via Bluetooth, where an AI is able to make sense of the thousands of data points collected and give us some real insight, essentially giving this product a voice,” he says in the video.
In the demonstration, Casavant asked how the package had been handled throughout the supply chain, and a few moments later an answer appeared on a phone app informing him that it had been out of temperature compliance for an hour, as well as when and where the problem occurred.
WiliBot also can say which package should be shelved first based on its expiration and which packages are the freshest. Besides its uses in retail, the WiliBot also can be used in healthcare and post and parcel businesses.
Qualcomm Connection
Wiliot was launched in 2017 by CEO Tal Tamir, Yaron Elboim, and Alon Yehezkely after their startup Wilocity was bought by Qualcomm in 2014. The new company’s name is a combination of Wilocity and IoT.
The company raised about $19 million in Series A fundraising its first year and another $50 million in a Series B round in 2019 and 2020.
Chief Marketing Officer
Wiliot
Its most significant jump came with a $200 million Series C round in 2021, which Chief Marketing Officer Steve Statler said allowed Wiliot to grow in size and produce 100-million-pixel tags.
The company developed technology to produce a postage stamp-size, ultra-thin tag that is powered by surrounding Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth radio signals.
“Rather than having very expensive radios talking to very expensive sensors, you use the radios that are already pervasive that are out there,” Statler said, describing the tags’ function as similar to Apple Air tags. “But rather than 30 bucks, they cost somewhere between 30 cents to 10 cents.”
The pixels are sold at cost to clients, Statler said.
“We decided that this will scale faster if we don’t load any cost on the tags and we just sell the cloud services that are required to make sense of this tsunami of data that’s spewing from all of these tags all of the time,” he said.
Keeping Tab with Tags
As Statler explained, the tabs can track the temperature and location of assets and inventory in real time, which can save time and money for retailers who otherwise might pay someone to do the same task with a scanner.
“And if you can keep track of where all your inventory is, you can do a much better job,” he said. “You can operate more efficiently, have less out-of-stocks and have less capital tied up in the supply chain.”
Even more information is tracked with WiliBot, which also represents a leap in how AI is used, Statler said.
“The news is we’re opening the gates between the physical world and artificial intelligence,” he said.
Elaborating, he said ChatGPT is amazing, but it gets its input from keyboards, scanning text and analyzing photographs, whichStatler called “kind of a proxy for the real world.”
In contract, the WiliBot uses real-world data to gather information, which he said can revolutionize industries such as retail and healthcare.
The WiliBot will roll out later this year, and it could be available to home consumers in a few years, Statler said.
Wiliot
FOUNDED: 2017
CEO: Tal Tamir
HEADQUARTERS: Scripps Ranch
BUSINESS: AI technology
FUNDING: $270 million
EMPLOYEES: 240 (25 in San Diego)
WEBSITE: https://www.wiliot.com
NOTABLE: The company plans to increase its product production from millions to billions in the next few years.
