Ben Ames

The internet of things (IoT) technology provider Wiliot is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to build a platform that allows “things to talk” and enables businesses and consumers to ask questions about – and have conversations with – their myriad connected products.

San Diego-based Wiliot on Tuesday launched the “WiliBot,” calling it a generative AI (GenAI) chatbot that enables natural-language conversations with any ambient IoT-connected product.

The system leverages Wiliot’s core product, its “Ambient Data Platform” that uses stamp-sized, self-powered IoT Pixels affixed to products, packaging, containers, crates, or pallets. Those IoT Pixels send wireless information—such as location, temperature, humidity, and carbon footprint—to the Wiliot cloud, where businesses can analyze the data. The firm’s AI and machine-learning algorithms can also identify supply chain “events” and automatically generate alerts or 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.

By combining GenAI with that enormous source of real-time ambient physical world data, companies – and eventually consumers – will be able to have important conversations with the products they make, source, distribute, and ultimately purchase, San Diego-based Wiliot said.

“Ambient IoT and generative AI are increasingly symbiotic technologies. Ambient IoT generates vast amounts of data about trillions of everyday things, and GenAI can uniquely make sense of all that data,” Wiliot CEO Tal Tamir said in a release. “On the flipside, GenAI learns by analyzing 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.”