walmart is deploying millions of environmental IoT sensors across a large U.S. supply chain, without the need for batteries.
The retail giant is using Wiliot’s technology in what the IoT vendor is calling the first large-scale deployment of ambient IoT in the retail industry and one of the largest to date.
Ambient IoT is a class of IoT devices that operate by harvesting ambient energy, primarily from radio waves, light, motion, heat, or other viable sources of ambient energy. It is an evolution of traditional IoT and radio frequency identification technologies that promises low cost and high scalability.
Walmart plans to use IoT sensors to track pallets across the country by the end of 2026. “While we are considering expansion into other global markets, our immediate focus is on the U.S.,” Cathy said.
The company will now have real-time insight into inventory management, knowing exactly where an item is and whether it is owned by a retailer at any time, and will be able to cover an estimated 90 million pallets of inventory when fully operational.
The ambient IoT sensors used by Walmart capture signals about temperature, location, humidity, and length of stay. These signals are linked with the company’s advanced artificial intelligence systems, allowing the company to dramatically improve supply chain efficiency, inventory accuracy, and cold chain compliance.
“We plan to be active in approximately 500 Walmart stores by the end of the year, with plans to expand nationwide in 2026,” said Greg Cathy, Walmart’s senior vice president of transformation and innovation. He said the deployment will cover 4,600 Walmart Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets and more than 40 distribution centers and will generate high-resolution supply chain data that will be fed into Walmart’s AI systems.
“This data provides proof of delivery, improves replenishment decisions, and lets you know where your goods are in real time,” Cathy said. “By combining continuous sensing and AI, we are moving from probabilistic predictions to accurate decision-making.”
Improved supply chain visibility
The addition of ambient IoT sensors is important because it provides new data streams to the AI system, making it even more effective in increasing visibility into Walmart’s supply chain operations.
Cathy said this technology effort is already having a big impact by eliminating some manual work and providing automated alerts. “Employees no longer have to perform time-consuming checks to find items,” he said. “Automated alerts now flag this information in real time, allowing our employees to act faster and spend more time serving customers.”
Improved supply chain visibility also helps resolve inventory discrepancies and enables a better customer experience.
Although Kathy did not provide specific numbers for cost savings, Walmart expects to benefit from improved supply chain efficiency, improved inventory accuracy, reduced manual labor for employees, and the ability to get products on shelves faster. “Customers will benefit from improved product availability and consistency,” he said.
“The performance of an AI system is determined by its training data. The better the data, the better the AI will perform,” said Julien Bellanger, President of Wiliot. “Supply chain AI has long been powered by inherently stale data: predictive data that represents predictions rather than reality.”
Belanger said ambient IoT is changing this model by leveraging AI with data that reflects what’s actually happening across the supply chain.
“We’ve been here before. Walmart was an early adopter of RFID in 2004 and should have offered much of the same functionality,” said Bill Ray, distinguished vice president, analyst and head of research at research firm Gartner. “But this time the cost of tags has come down significantly and that will be the tipping point.”
Ray says it’s important to note that the value of such IoT systems is already known. “When RFID was first touted as a solution to supply chain problems, the business model has been well studied and evaluated,” he said. “RFID has had a huge impact, but the cost of the tags has hindered the promised transformation. The industry has been able to integrate new, low-cost tags into the same value model and come up with a positive answer.”
Gartner has been tracking Wiliot for a long time. “The question was never whether the technology could deliver on its promise. The question was whether Williot could reliably scale production without sacrificing tag performance or price, and whether it could be integrated with existing supply chain systems. This announcement shows that Walmart believes it can do it, and now Williot will have to prove it,” Ray said.
“Ambient IoT works,” Cathey says. “There is no need to walk around or scan. This allows our employees to do what they need to do and focus on operating safely and efficiently with continuous real-time visibility into our supply chain.”
Ambient IoT gained momentum earlier this year with the creation of a new business alliance to develop and promote an open, multi-standard ecosystem for ambient IoT manufacturers, suppliers, integrators, operators, users, and customers based on the next generation of battery-free ambient IoT standards.
By focusing on advanced communication technologies, the alliance seeks to overcome the limitations of traditional battery-powered IoT devices and promote more sustainable and efficient products.
