Ambient IoT specialist Wiliot secured its first major deployment in the retail sector through a contract with giant Walmart which it predicted would yield significant improvements in supply chain efficiency.

The job involves integrating Wiliot’s system with Walmart’s AI set-up to provide more accurate inventory information and details on cold chain compliance.

Wiliot stated millions of its IoT Pixel devices are being integrated throughout Walmart’s supply chain to provide real-time insights into inventory management by tracking pallets at scale.

The companies aim to deploy 90 million devices by the end of 2026, making it one of the largest ambient IoT deployments to date.

“With Walmart, we are advancing supply chain performance at an unprecedented scale,” Wiliot CEO Tal Tamir said.

Ambient IoT devices are self-powered, using their local environment rather than a fixed or battery supply.

In an article published in 2024, standards group 3GPP explained ambient IoT devices could be crucial in mass deployments of the technology, removing limits of current cellular set-ups including a need to replace batteries.

3GPP stated ambient IoT devices can gather energy from sources including “electromagnetic, thermal and solar”, and operate with “limited energy storage capacity”.

Wiliot said its deployment for Walmart is eliminating manual tasks and providing automated alerts, enabling the retailer to respond more quickly and cleverly, along with helping to fix discrepancies in its inventory.

Walmart SVP of Transformation and Innovation Greg Cathey said the IoT devices are helping it tackle “one of the hardest problems in retail, knowing exactly what we own and where it is”.

The system is already being used in 500 Walmart locations and will ultimately cover 4,600 retail premises and more than 40 distribution centres.