San Diego, Calif. – Wiliot has introduced its Gen3 IoT Pixel, the latest generation of its battery-free sensing technology, expanding the performance, scale, and affordability of ambient IoT deployments across global supply chains. The announcement follows a year of significant commercial expansion for the company, including what it has described as one of the world’s largest ambient IoT deployments, covering 90 million pallets at Walmart through 2026.
While the Gen3 Pixel represents a meaningful hardware advance, Wiliot executives emphasize that the real value lies in how continuous, item-level data feeds into the company’s Wiliot Intelligence Platform, enabling automated decision-making and what the company refers to as Physical AI.
“We’re a platform company at the end of the day,” said Amir Khoshniyati, who discussed the launch with Reusable Packaging News. “The tags are exciting, but they’re enablers. What we’ve built is an ecosystem that ingests data and turns it into something customers can actually act on.”
Lower cost, longer range, broader sensing
The Gen3 IoT Pixel builds on Wiliot’s Gen2 design with a redesigned material stack that replaces copper with aluminum, improving harvesting efficiency while lowering material cost. The Pixel operates across both 2.4 GHz and sub-1 GHz bands, delivering longer energizing and read ranges and improved broadcast reliability in dense logistics environments.
According to Wiliot, the Gen3 Pixel now supports location, temperature, humidity, and light sensing, while driving unit costs down to around ten cents per tag, a key threshold for large-scale pallet and case-level deployments.
“With Gen3, we adjusted the material stack-up and moved from copper to aluminum,” Khoshniyati said. “That gave us significantly better performance, additional sensing capabilities, and a much better cost structure, all at the same time.”
The Pixel is roughly the size of a postage stamp and requires no battery. It broadcasts encrypted Bluetooth Low Energy signals that can be read by certified gateways and access points, creating an always-on sensing layer that streams real-world data into enterprise systems.
Wiliot offers the Gen3 IoT Pixel in both consumable and durable formats, depending on the asset and operating environment.
Consumable tags are typically applied as converted labels during pallet build and shrink-wrapping, particularly in high-volume retail and grocery flows. Durable versions are ruggedized for reuse and are designed for assets such as roll cages, totes, and reusable containers operating in harsh warehouse conditions.
“In large retail deployments, the tags are serialized and applied as pallets are assembled,” Khoshniyati explained. “But we also have durable versions that are converted differently and designed to survive the beating that reusable assets take in warehouse environments.”
Wiliot cited deployments at Royal Mail, where durable tags have been mounted on roll cages for multiple years. In those cases, tags are positioned on protected placards and bound at the corners of the asset to avoid strike zones and metal interference.
“We’ve had those tags running in the field for a couple of years now, using the same hardware,” Khoshniyati said. “Once they’re positioned correctly, they hold up very well.”
Five core solutions anchored in continuous data
Rather than selling individual use cases, Wiliot frames its platform around five core solutions that customers deploy individually or in combination:
Automated shipment verification
Automated shipment receiving
Temperature and condition monitoring
Reusable asset counts
Asset management for RTIs, such as roll cages and crates
As customers move from pilot programs to scaled deployments, Wiliot works with them to quantify ROI across these areas, particularly by reducing dwell time, product loss, and manual labor.
“We’re very focused on working the ROI behind those five solutions,” Khoshniyati said. “Whether it’s a large retailer or a postal operation, they’re usually using some combination of those five, and that’s where the value starts to become very clear.”
From alerts to automated decision-making
Wiliot’s platform supports both event-based alerts and increasingly automated responses. Customers can receive real-time notifications via APIs when assets are misplaced, dwell times are exceeded, or temperature thresholds are violated. On top of that, Wiliot has embedded AI agents into the platform to reduce manual intervention.
“We built an AI agent into the platform called Willy Bot,” Khoshniyati said. “You can ask it questions very much like you would ChatGPT, and it can identify misplaced packages, items that need refrigeration, or assets that went down the wrong path.”
One area where automation delivers immediate value is temperature monitoring, particularly for perishable goods. Unlike battery-powered sensors that can fail or lose connectivity, Wiliot’s battery-free approach provides continuous condition visibility from distribution center to store.
“There’s a big gap in the industry when it comes to sensing without batteries,” Khoshniyati said. “If the battery dies, you lose visibility. With ambient IoT, we can validate every node and every event in the journey.”
By capturing the full temperature history of a pallet, the platform can flag risk as soon as a load hits the dock, recommend corrective action within minutes, or even support decisions to remove compromised product from sale.
“In some cases, FIFO alone isn’t enough,” Khoshniyati added. “The first pallet in isn’t always the best pallet to sell if something went wrong during the journey.”
Physical AI moves toward infrastructure
Wiliot sees Gen3 as a step toward making ambient IoT a core data infrastructure rather than a niche sensing layer. As deployments scale, the company expects the Intelligence Platform to ingest more data sources and support more automated workflows.
“The innovations in Gen3 are exciting,” Khoshniyati said. “But what really excites me is how the platform is coming together. It’s becoming a data ingestion engine for all kinds of solutions, and Gen3 is just the starting point.”
Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.
