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This week, we’re looking at how Ambient IoT is executing on RFID’s decades-old promises, how eSIM can help meet urgent IoT security compliance needs, and more!

Walmart is mid-rollout on one of the largest sensor deployments in retail history — and none of it requires batteries, scanners, or someone walking the floor with a reader gun. The company is working with Wiliot to tag 90 million pallets with battery-free Bluetooth sensors across 4,600 locations by end of 2026. The sensors pull energy from ambient radio waves, continuously reporting location, temperature, and humidity with no active infrastructure pointed at them. This is almost exactly what the industry was promised when RFID mandates started appearing in 2003 and 2004: item-level supply chain visibility, automatically, at scale. That promise hit a wall of proprietary readers, spotty coverage, and tags that could only report identity. Twenty years later, the infrastructure problem has been solved — at least in part.

The gap between classic RFID and ambient IoT comes down to how data moves. Traditional tags needed a dedicated reader within range to interrogate them, which meant deploying specialized hardware at every chokepoint and accepting that anything outside those chokepoints was invisible. Pallets on a truck, merchandise in a backroom, stock sitting in a receiving bay — all dark between scan events. Ambient tags communicate over standard Bluetooth and cellular infrastructure already present in most commercial environments. They don't wait to be asked; they broadcast continuously. A Gartner analyst summarized it drily when the Walmart deal was announced: the business case has been understood since RFID first appeared, but cost-per-tag and infrastructure overhead made item-level tracking impractical. That cost equation has shifted. Whether it's shifted enough to hold at 90 million pallets in production is still an open question.

The standards layer is also moving. In February, ISO/IEC 18000-65 was finalized by a consortium including Panasonic and Keio University. The standard addresses a specific constraint that has limited passive RFID for decades: tags could transmit identity but not continuous sensor data, because the energy harvested from radio waves wasn't enough to sustain a stream. The fix is a dedicated sub-channel per tag, letting it wake up, identify itself, and shift into streaming mode for vibration, temperature, or strain readings — no battery required. That capability matters most in industrial settings, where knowing a component is present is less useful than knowing whether it's under abnormal stress. The Ambient IoT Alliance, formed earlier this year, is now working to align Bluetooth, 3GPP, and IEEE around a common ecosystem, with the explicit goal of avoiding the proprietary fragmentation that stalled first-generation RFID.

The supply chain case for continuous sensing has always been legible on paper: real-time inventory accuracy reduces stockouts, condition monitoring catches cold chain breaks earlier, and scan-free receiving reduces labor. What's shifted is that these benefits are now approachable without dedicated reader infrastructure. Logistics operations built around periodic scan events work with data that's inherently stale — a pallet scanned at receiving and again at shipping tells you it arrived and left, nothing more. Continuous ambient sensing fills in the gaps. Early reports from Walmart's rollout suggest the expected pattern: automated alerts replacing manual checks, inventory discrepancies surfacing faster. Those are real operational gains, though early-stage results from a single retailer aren't the same as a proven playbook.

The integration layer is where the real work lives, and it's not solved. Raw signals from millions of tags are useless without a platform that filters and routes them into existing WMS or ERP workflows. The platforms are maturing — 3GPP Release 19 includes ambient IoT specifications, and the new Alliance is pushing toward interoperability between tags and readers from different manufacturers. That interoperability isn't fully there yet. Organizations deploying at scale will hit data volume and integration complexity that pilots don't surface. The direction is clear enough: IoT visibility that requires infrastructure deliberately pointed at things is giving way to systems that use the wireless environment already around them. The execution gap between that direction and a working production deployment is still meaningful.

Billions of connected devices have made the world a smarter place. But alongside the connectivity boom, a security debt has been quietly accumulating. Many of those devices were shipped without a reliable, long-term mechanism to keep them secure. Now, regulation is calling in that debt.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Wienke Giezeman, CEO and co-founder of The Things Industries, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss how IoT is finally delivering what it promised ten years ago. The conversation covers what changed technically and commercially, the ROI of IoT, why deployments failed in the early days, criticism of IoT, what companies still get wrong about LoRaWAN, and The Things Conference 2026.

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