A new generative AI chatbot allows ‘things to talk’ with companies about their carbon footprint.
The WiliBot chatbot enables natural-language conversations with any ambient IoT-connected product, according to Internet of Things (IoT) company, Wiliot.
When the power of generative AI is combined with this enormous source of real-time ambient physical world data, companies – and eventually consumers – can have important conversations with the products they make, source, distribute, and ultimately purchase.
With WiliBot, companies will be able to converse with their products and supply chains by asking questions such as: What’s the shelf life of this product? How did it get to the store? Which product should I stock next, and why? Is this product safe to stock, and why? What is the carbon footprint of this product, and why is it so low or so high?
“Ambient IoT and generative AI are increasingly symbiotic technologies,” explained Wiliot CEO Tal Tamir. “Ambient IoT generates vast amounts of data about trillions of everyday things, and GenAI can uniquely make sense of all that data.
“On the flipside, GenAI learns by analysing vast amounts of data. To a real extent, that data has so far been finite, but ambient IoT presents massive new physical world datasets that a GenAI platform like WiliBot — and others — can use to describe products, materials, supply chains, and everything connected to the internet.”
Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform uses stamp-sized, self-powered IoT Pixels affixed to products, packaging, containers, crates, pallets, and more. These IoT Pixels communicate via Bluetooth information such as location, temperature, humidity, and carbon footprint to the Wiliot cloud where businesses analyze the data.
Wiliot-developed AI and machine-learning algorithms can then identify supply chain “events” and automatically generate alerts or AI responses that allow business to course-correct or optimize their operations, like when sensing that shipments of produce or pharmaceuticals have been handled at unsafe temperatures.
“Although Wiliot’s work in generative AI is relatively recent, the company has long been a pioneer in artificial intelligence and machine learning for deriving insights into ambient IoT data,” Tamir continued.
“As more companies have begun rolling out Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform, we’ve been asked how GenAI capabilities might make the transformation even easier. Our answer is WiliBot, the real-world combination of ambient IoT and AI.”
Wiliot is already piloting WiliBot with key enterprise customers, and a broader rollout is scheduled for late 2024 and into 2025. During this piloting phase, WiliBot will be used by businesses seeking to ask questions about their ambient IoT-enabled products and supply chains.
In the future, this convergence of ambient IoT and generative AI will be made available to consumers in-store and at-home through an ecosystem of mobile apps – enabling consumers to speak to and converse with their products to better understand their carbon footprint, materials composition, ethical sourcing compliance, quality and safety, and more.
“Tamir concluded, “Now more businesses – and in the future consumers – will be able to ask about and easily understand everything about those products.”
WiliBot is built on top of a leading large language model (LLM) to combine the breakthrough capabilities of ambient IoT with GenAI computational power to usher in a new era of supply chain visibility.
The importance of the linkage between ambient IoT and AI has been recently borne out in projects with leading food retailers. In the projects, the Wiliot Ambient Data Platform revealed that food shrink accounts for roughly five percent of goods in the food chain – food that is lost, damaged, or spoiled before it reaches store shelves.
Wiliot claims its platform can solve two-thirds of these food shrink issues – ensuring a safer food supply, higher customer satisfaction, and lower costs – while WiliBot will democratise access to these insights across the organisation.
