By Amir Khoshniyati
Head of Strategy & Business Development, Wiliot

Wiliot has joined the Advisory Board of Auburn University’s RFID Lab, one of the world’s foremost research centers advancing connected supply chain technologies. It’s a privilege to represent Wiliot within this influential group – collaborating with academic and industry leaders who continue to shape how global commerce moves, measures, and manages the flow of goods.

A nationwide deployment with Walmart – the largest of its kind in retail – and a strategic manufacturing partnership with Avery Dennison have demonstrated that ambient IoT and Physical AI are now operating at global scale, delivering measurable value across the world’s most advanced supply chains.

This latest announcement represents a new kind of progress. Wiliot joining the Auburn RFID Lab Advisory Board signals the institutional recognition of ambient IoT’s role in shaping the standards, interoperability, and education that will guide its next phase of growth.

It affirms Ambient IoT’s emergence as a foundational and future proof technology – one now being advanced through collaboration between industry, academia, and standards bodies to define how intelligence in the physical world is understood, measured, and scaled.

Building on the Foundations of RFID

RFID gave enterprises the first reliable visibility into their supply chains – without a line of sight needed – enabling item-level traceability that transformed global operations.

Ambient IoT now extends this visibility through a new class of battery-free Bluetooth sensors that embed intelligence directly into the physical world. These sensors generate a continuous flow of item-level information – a living stream of environmental and location data that reveals how goods move and interact across networks.

This capability forms the foundation of Physical AI: intelligence that perceives and acts upon the real world with the same immediacy and precision that digital AI applies to online data.

The Data Layer Powering Physical World Intelligence

For decades, AI’s impact on the supply chain was limited by the quality and timeliness of its inputs. Ambient IoT overcomes those limitations by delivering a continuous, real-time stream of ground-truth data, allowing AI systems to make decisions based on what is happening now – not what happened hours or days ago.

As part of the Auburn University RFID Lab Advisory Board, Wiliot will help define how RFID and Ambient IoT coexist as complementary technologies: RFID capturing event-based milestones, and ambient IoT maintaining uninterrupted situational awareness. Together, they create a unified framework that enables more intelligent, adaptive, and autonomous supply chains.

Advancing a Shared Vision

Wiliot joining also marks the first formal representation of the ambient IoT sector within Auburn’s advisory ecosystem – a milestone that aligns academic leadership with technological progress. It highlights a growing industry understanding that continuous, data-rich visibility has become a foundational layer of modern operations, essential for efficiency, compliance, and sustainability.

That reality is already taking shape at scale. Through Walmart, millions of Wiliot IoT Pixels are continuously streaming real-time data that feeds AI-driven systems – optimizing inventory, safeguarding cold chain integrity, and improving operational performance across one of the most complex logistics networks in existence. Through Avery Dennison, next-generation IoT Pixels are being produced and deployed globally, expanding accessibility and affordability for enterprises worldwide.

Now, through collaboration with Auburn University’s RFID Lab, Wiliot is helping to ensure that this momentum is matched by the necessary frameworks for interoperability, standardization, and education – bridging commercial innovation with academic rigor to drive sustained industry transformation.

Moving Toward a More Intelligent Physical World

Just as the internet connected computers, Ambient IoT connects the physical world itself – the goods, materials, and environments that form the foundation of the global economy. By joining the Auburn RFID Lab Advisory Board, Wiliot is contributing to the definition of the standards and systems that will make that world intelligent, responsive, and adaptive.

More than a corporate milestone, it marks a defining moment for the evolution of connected supply chains. Ambient IoT and Physical AI have arrived, and with them comes a new paradigm – one in which every product can sense, communicate, and contribute to the intelligence of the systems that move our world forward.