Host Mike Graen sits down with Steve Statler from Wiliot in part one of this episode to discuss their tech including:

• How they measure on shelf availability
• How Wiliot came to be
• Cost of tags
• Practical examples of how it's used in retail

Hello, my name is Mike Graen. Welcome to the

University of Arkansas Supply Chain Management Research

Council focusing on on shelf availability. I'm happy to host

this and we've got a pretty exciting guest today. Steve

Statler from Wiliot is going to be joining us. Wiliot, it is a

Bluetooth enabled RFID solution, which allows the product to be

tracked throughout the supply chain. Join us in progress as we

get connected with Steve and hear a little bit about what

Willie has to offer the industry. Well, good afternoon,

everybody. And thank you very much for joining us today. I am

really excited to have this conversation with Steve seat in

a live talk talked a couple of different times before and, and

I'm really excited. And frankly, I'm going to be a student today,

Steve, I'm gonna I'm gonna learn some stuff because I think we

just had a kind of off off camera conversation that says

sometimes it's not what you don't know that search you is

what you know this not so and I think there's some perceptions

around Bluetooth technology that people may not really understand

how it works, what what it works for etcetera. So we're going to

introduce Steve here in just a minute. But what I want to do is

kind of set the context for the audience. Matt, you're exactly

right. This is a this is a conversation on retail, we're

going to learn some things, we would ask you to go ahead and if

you have any questions or any that you or any builds you'd

like to make, go ahead and put those in the chat and we'd be

happy to take those. But as you know, this is a as a session

which is focused on on shelf availability, things that are on

the shelf available for customers to buy, or things that

are on the shelf for a associate in a store to pick up for a

customer to buy. It's all about that. And when we talk about

that just as a brief context to set some perspective here, I've

got some examples here of here's a shelf that looks like it's in

pretty good shape, we definitely see that we have one out of

stock product right there. But everything else by the by the

normal, I would say it looks in products pretty good shape. And

Steven, I know it's we've been in this business for a while,

there's probably some issues here, we've got some situation

where we have some labels missing, we've got some issues

where these blue boxes where the price is on the on the shelf and

the price at the register are different. We have some

opportunities to take product off of a kind of a down stock or

top shelf thing and put it where it's supposed to go on the shelf

when the when it will fit. And then we have items that that are

plugged or otherwise, the labels there the products there, but

the product and the label are different. So there is the

incorrect product is there? Well, okay, great. That's all

interesting. We've talked about that before. But we've talked

about like six different ways to measure OSA. One is algorithms

and we've had a series of sessions on algorithms. We've

talked about store audits, this happens to be field agent, the

ability, we've talked to the field agent in the tracks,

folks, before about that capability. We've talked about

shelf scanning robots. This is an example of a badger robot at

Woodlands, scanning the shelf for auto stock. We've talked a

lot about RFID and radiofrequency identification

and how that's used, particularly in general

merchandise and apparel and starting to get in some food

categories. We've talked about some of the in the shopping

online shopping services like Instacart, where you order

something and it's not available, they can indicate

that to you on the application. And we've talked about fixed

readers. So now we're talking to William, who is a completely

different platform on this. But one of the things I want to make

sure we understand if things are not on the shelf. Steve, there's

usually a couple of reasons why I know these were over

simplified, but store operations, meaning the product

could be sitting in the back room but not on the sales floor.

And last time I checked, we don't sell a lot of stuff in the

back room, could be supply chain could be stuck at the DC could

be the manufacturer didn't order could be lots of different

reasons. Or it could be store on hand accuracy. And I think one

of the beautiful things that we're going to be talking about

here in a minute, is the supply chain goes from raw materials

through manufacturing through distribution to the distribution

center to the retailer to the store. And this happens to be a

Walmart example but backroom and sales floor of a Walmart store

to the customer. The critical part for me is if product is

going to move this way, then what has to move the opposite

direction is information, right information about where this

particular product is. So with that, I want to introduce Steve,

Steve and I have been working together - he's the CMO at

Wiliot technology. And see before we jump into the

technology stuff one of the things I always love to ask our

guests because As we're not only supply chain technology

professionals in the retail space, but we're also customers,

and we shop like every other customer, we order things online

and go to pick them up like every other customer. Can you

tell us from a personal perspective, from a shopping

standpoint, anytime where you actually were disappointed where

you ordered something, or went in to get something from a

store, and it wasn't there, I'd love to hear your story.

Well, first, Mike, it's a pleasure and a

privilege to be on your show. I think it's doing good work. And

I love this question because it makes what you're doing what

we're doing personal. And I have actually two that I wanted to

talk about briefly, and that they both had COVID as the

catalyst. And one was, you know, during that time, there was a

high level of anxiety. And, like it or not, we a lot of us had to

get tested. But finding the kits was really hard. That was

something that really stressed our supply chains. And I

remember going online and being very pleased with myself, you

know, showing my wife, I'd found that one pharmacy pharmacy where

I could get the kid. So I got in the car, drove 25 minutes, got

to the store, went to the shelf, nothing. I'm like, Oh, if you

just run out, it's like, no, no, we have no need for these. So

that was one that made me look really stupid. And I was also

very anxious. But the other thing that is more, even more

personal is actually my mother, you know, during COVID, she

started she's in her 80s mobilities not her strong point.

And so COVID taught her along with millions of other people to

buy online and had the home deliveries, but she struggles

with the technology. And it's a source of real. I mean, she's at

their computers, the internet didn't exist. Actually, the

internet didn't exist when I when I was a kid, but it

certainly didn't exist when she was so she struggles. And when

she orders something, and it doesn't arrive, she just gets

really confused. And you know, for her, this is a lifeline. And

yeah, I do her shopping when that doesn't work, but it's a

source of exasperation and frustration for her. And you

know, you're you're only as happy as your least happy member

of your family, your kids and your parents. And so it really

upsets me.

Yeah, and it does. And that's a much more personal.

When you start talking about your health, or you start

talking about foods that you put in your body or medicines you

put in your body, you know, I can go to the store and be

disappointed because they don't have my printer cartridge is one

of my favorite examples. They may have 1000 printer

cartridges, but the ones the black one from my printer is not

available, I get aggravated. But I can quickly get out my phone

and order it from Amazon or Best Buy or somebody and have it show

a couple days later, when you started talking about COVID

tests in this in the heat of the pandemic. You can't find those

you start getting panicky. Those are a couple of really, really

good examples. Yeah, for sure. So a lot of people are very,

very new, you've probably probably heard or Willie it

before. They've probably seen it on billboards. You being the

marketing person, you've probably seen one of your videos

with the back wall that you've done, et cetera. But walk us

Wiliot technology. Tell us about Wiliot

and how did it come to be about?

Well, high level - very high level - I'll talk in

abstract terms, then we'll get to the specifics. We're opening

up a portal between the digital world of AI and chat GPT and the

entire physical world. If you think about the power of the

internet, it's been bottled up up until now really only a few

expensive things are connected. And then RFID did amazing

pioneering work with snapshots of of where things are. But what

we're seeing now is the floodgates are opening and it's

now a real time connection between every single thing and

immense power that can really help to I think make a

difference in some really important areas. Getting our

supply chains more efficient, means lower prices means less

waste, it's better for the environment. We can solve things

like productivity, which are developed world productivity is

flatlined. We needed to improve if people like you or me get to

retire. And you know, crime and theft and so forth. So there's a

lot of opportunities to bring the physical and the digital

world together. We'll get into specifics. So that's kind of the

vision that the founders had for Wiliot back in 2017. January of

2017, they'd sold their previous company to Qualcomm for hundreds

of millions of dollars. That company pioneered a technology

called millimeter wave - which to grossly simplify is one of

the things that makes 5G a lot faster than 4G. So very

successful exit, and very innovative technology that's

speeds up wireless in a premium fashion. What they decided,

having spent a couple of years handing over the reins in

Qualcomm was that the Internet of Things this applying the

power of the internet to the physical world, had got into a

dead end, the cul de sac. And really, we had done what human

beings often do, which is over engineer the solutions. And

either the sensors were super expensive, or the readers were

super expensive. And the result was we had the internet of

expensive things, in some cases, or just a kind of very coarse

grained snapshot of the way things were not the way things

are. And the reason was that, you know, readers cost thousands

of dollars. And so you ended up having a lot of handheld reading

of this RFID technology, the evolution of radio frequency

identifier, tags, these stickers with antennas that people see

hanging on apparel labels, that the cost of those had gone down.

And that was very successful. But when the readers are

expensive, you end up having the kind of situation it's a bit

like photography, when you used to have these black and white

photographs that were generational photographs,

because the cameras were big and complicated and expensive. And

you often wondered, well, what was their life really like, and

but you didn't know, because they only had a few photographs

every year now we have like 4k streaming video of every moment

of our lives. And maybe we know more than we would really like.

But that is the era that we feel like we're entering in. As you

get both very low cost tags. This is one of the ones that we

enable, and an ambient IoT ambient, meaning it's

everywhere, it's all around, it's pervasive, where every

radio can start to read those things. So it's not just the

handheld readers, it's the Wi Fi access points. It's the radios

that are in your appliances, your fridge, your washing

machine, your smart speaker, your phone, and that world where

everything can have an identifier and everything can

read, it is going to give us a level of visibility, which means

that you'll never have to worry about losing your glasses, your

passport, your food will be safe. You won't have to worry

about the theft, counterfeit all of these hidden overheads. And

also, it'll be a way of working on on shelf availability so that

when you go to the store, the thing that you're hoping to get

you can get. And you'll get it without a huge amount of

overhead without huge stock buffers or masses of extra

people having to be hired that increased prices. So I say but

in a world where things are done efficiently, which is at the end

of the day, what we need if we're going to have prices for

everyday people that allow them to live better lives. Oh, I've

lost your audio for some reason.

Sorry. I had an ambulance go by. So I thought

I'd go on mute rather than you guys listen to the ambulance

that went by. So what we've got is a situation where

traditional, what we would call rain or UFH RFID put a tag on

the product -let's just say it's a passive tag - the tag is

fairly inexpensive. It's somewhere between I'm just gonna

give a broad range of a five to 10 cents kind of thing. But the

readers to capture that to say, here's where I am to energize

and get that feedback is fairly expensive, especially if you

move to lots of them and a fixed infrastructure, etc. What you

guys have done is I would assume the cost of the tag is a little

bit more with Wiliot yet but there's really no reader

required because I'm imagining my cell phone and if I have a

Bluetooth enabled cell phone, I'm probably energizing that tag

in fact telling you the location where that is is that how that

works?

Yeah, that's a really good summary. The tags

are today - we're a bit more expensive - but the the price

reduction you know Moore's Law - Jeffrey Moore - one of the

people that helped found Intel predicted the price of chip

technology would halve every 18 months and that's what we're

seeing with what we're doing. So next year, our tags will be less

than 10 cents 18 months after that you can expect the price to

go down and and the reason is we're essentially using the same

manufacturing process we're actually working with the same

companies to make what we sell and we call them pixels. Wiliot

IoT pixels. This is one of them. It's a It looks just like a

conventional RFID tag, it's got an antenna on the back, it's got

the chip that talks to it. One of the differences, it's got a

Bluetooth qualification logo and an FCC certification logo. So

you've probably never seen a sticker unless you've seen one

of these that has that. And those basically mean that they

can the FCC logo means this is pushing data out all of the

time, it's capturing energy, it's actually an active radio

that is starting the conversation, rather than

waiting to be talked to. And the Bluetooth logo just means that

it can talk to smart speakers, phones, and Wi Fi, access

points, and doorbells, and a bunch of other things that are

starting to get radios in them. So these things are made using

exactly the same machines that are used to make a rain RFID

tag. And one of our investors happens to be Avery Dennison,

one of the leaders in that space. And we work with them and

their competitors, companies like identiv, and a bunch of

other well known names to make the tags. And in fact, we our

goal is to not make any money from the tags. We sell software

as a service, the insights, the triggers that say, Oh, you're

out of stock, or oh, there's a temperature excursion all of

these unlike regular RFID tags, that temperature sensors. later

on this year, we'll have humidity sensing. And so it

looks the same, but it's I would characterize it as an evolution,

we stand on the shoulders of the original RFID pioneers, we use a

lot of the same things. And we fact we work with a lot of the

same people. The difference is we're using commodity radios

rather than these very specialist radios, which were

developed with rewrites in mind, if you think about, you know,

when this technology was first introduced, everyone was really

concerned about can I read a thousand tags quickly? And can I

read them very accurately? And so you know, what we did as

engineers is we created these big expensive readers that could

say yes, but I was actually at a project review. One of our, our

largest customer, and they said, I don't care about read-rates, I

care about visibility. I want 100% visibility. And if I get

that with not 99% read rates, but a 90% read rate, because I'm

using a reader that cost $25 rather than $2,000. I'm happy

because that gives me really high visibility, and it gives it

to me without my store associate having to do anything, which is

really the key, because when the store associates doing the

reading, the process is working properly, the time you want the

visibility is when things aren't working properly, when the thing

got lost, and it hasn't been scanned, and it's just kind of

sitting there frustrating, some shopper who who wants it and the

things that is in the store. It's just not in the right

place.

Gotcha. So walk us through kind of some practical

examples in retail is this primarily supply chain, I'm

putting these potential tags on cases to flow through the supply

chain. I know that we had some interesting thing with produce

crates of tracking those give us some practical examples in

retail how this technologies could be used.

So it can be used for so many things, but we

believe the sweet spot is in grocery and case-level tracking

that can be done automatically, and have sensing and the the key

driver for - because retailers are busy. And it's okay amazing

technology. It's a computer the size of a postage stamp, it's an

ARM processor, they really don't care. They're trying to solve

practical problems. And the biggest problem that's driving

people to move to what we call ambient IoT is the is the on

shelf availability problem. And it's the number of nil picks.

The time when an associate goes to pick up something from a

shelf to satisfy a customer or a customer is doing that is in

double digit percentage figures. And that's not sustainable when

you're competing with the likes of Amazon that had a fresh

start. Their entire supply chain was designed with this online

use case in mind. And you know, the brick and mortar retailers

they have amazing assets, stores that are close to people, human

beings that you can talk to a shopping experience that allows

you to touch but that's super expensive. So how do they

compete with the online Fresh Start retailer and you know,

they can start to bring up more automated warehouses like the

folks that Amazon has. But the the challenge with that is you

have all of the brick and mortar overhead. And if you're doing

everything that Amazon has done, then you've got all of that

automation overhead, or they can increase the buffer, you know,

start over ordering, but that's terrible for the balance sheet

and costs go up, or they can hire more people. And whilst

that's great, it's really hard to hire the people. And that

translates to more costs as well. So the technologies that

you've been covering on this show are really the route the

guy and this solution because it requires so little intervention.

And it's more than the the appeal is, yeah, it helps us

with OSI but actually helps us with the entire supply chain.

And it helps to solve some other really key problems like food

traceability, food safety, we have the FTAs FISMA, Food Safety

Modernization Act, which we have until January the 20th 2026. To

comply with, this is one of the best ways that you can start

checking in goods at the case level in an automated fashion

and satisfy that it's not really why our brief big project

started. But now it's there. It's like man, we've actually

got this digital visibility platform that can be used for

FISMA. And then lastly, there's a bunch of sustainability things

that when you have real time visibility, you can address and

those are basically opportunities to cut waste.

Organizing your flow of produce based on freshness and

rightness, same things that are sitting being kept at the wrong

temperature. So there's so many things you can do. But the the

the subject of your podcast is the is the catalyst. And you

know, grocery is where all of these problems exist, but

actually exists in a whole bunch of other industries as well. And

we are doing work in postal and other health care. But grocery

is really the sweet spot as far as we're concerned.

Okay, perfect. So I do have a question from my

friend Ted [last name?], he's got a question. That basically

I'll summarize it. But there used to be an expectation for

electronic article surveillance, basically, those old tags that

leave the store, summing up, some, some retailers were using

a Sensormatic tag. Others were using a Checkpoint tag - there

were two different competing infrastructures. The one that

probably suffered the most was people like Procter and Gamble,

because they got some product go into a Sensormatic customer,

some, some of it go into Checkpoint, customer, etc. When

we think about these tags, that sounds like in the food, this

probably makes sense for dry grocery, canned vegetables, a

lot of stuff that's probably not really RFID friendly anyway. But

when we think about things like apparel, a box of blue jeans,

we've already got RFID at the item level inside that box, how

do we avoid having suppliers have to put a different kind of

tag on the outside of the box to track the location of the tag?

That that is a issue? I think we're gonna have to continue to

think about his industry any kind of reaction to that.

Yeah, it's a really interesting subject. And

first of all, I'd say this is RFID. It's a radiofrequency

identifier. And so there are, there's a world where this can

be used in in apparel, and we've done a bunch of work with

amazing apparel companies to do real time visibility of tracking

the flow of apparel. I, as I talked to retail customers,

their approach to loss prevention seems to have

evolved. And, to be frank, I don't think this can compete. If

you if you want to take that slot and say I'm going to put a

Wiliot IoT pixel in its place, it's not going to do as well at

the use case as was designed for these ... some of the

technologies which are at a different frequency and use

different media. So if you do this, you're going to block

this, this this tag so it doesn't do as well, that the

triggering of the alarm that goes off as you cross the

threshold. What we're seeing is fewer and fewer retailers really

think that that approach is the best for some it will be other

many others what their biggest problem is thinking that they

got the red dress in stock when it actually isn't in stock

because you know, the sale of red dresses has gone down. Maybe

people don't like red dresses in our console. Actually they do.

It's just you, you don't have any and you think you've got

them so that real time detects sense of loss is something that

this technology can do a good job of. And I think way off in

the future, as ambient IoT starts to become pervasive, when

people are starting to use this technology in their wardrobe, in

their pantry to have auto replenishment and circular

approaches to sharing clothing and giving it back and renting

it, then then you'll start to see, you'll have the concept of

tracking products that are going to a destination where the

payment hasn't been made. And you can say, hey, you know,

there seem to be like 200 pairs of Levi's jeans in this person's

home, you know, and they don't appear to have paid for them,

then you can start to track them in the same way as an air tag

from Apple can be used to track things. I think we're, you know,

a few years away from that. And so the two technologies will

coexist, but if what you're focused on is just knowing,

understanding the inventory implications of theft, and this

is a good solution today.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with

Steve Statler. Join us again next time as we continue our

conversation exploring how Wiliot can be used in the retail