Byte-Sized AI: Ikea Pairs Drones and AI; Indian Textile Company Uses AI Model as Brand Ambassador
Byte-Sized AI is a bi-weekly column that covers all things artificial intelligence—from startup funding, to newly inked partnerships, to just-launched, AI-powered capabilities from major retailers, software providers and supply chain players.
Ikea enhances warehouse drones with AI
Ikea announced that it has been using AI technology to enhance the functionality of its in-warehouse drones.
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The company has partnered with AI and robotics company Verity since 2021, but its announcement states that it has expanded the capabilities of the drones Ikea uses in its warehouses. Thus far, the Swedish company has been testing its new drones in Belgium, but it now has plans to integrate the technology throughout Europe and North America.
The new systems help the drones to determine the location of—and photograph—where products are stored. It also helps them avoid colliding with one another because of improved obstacle detection and sensors for positioning on high levels of the warehouse.
Claes Lindgren, global category area manager of logistics services with Ikea, said the drones have helped to ease warehouse workers’ load.
“The drones are a good example where we can achieve a win-win in both of these areas; by simplifying our processes in the logistics units, and hence, ensuring better inventory integrity leading to a better customer experience,” he said in a statement.
As the company works to integrate more drones and improve the technology behind them, it has plans to program the drones to have functionalities related to unit loads and rack inspection.
Marcus Baumgartner, head of fulfillment and core services for Ikea Retail said that the company wants to see its employees work in tandem with technology.
“We continue to embrace the benefits of technology and innovation; our goal is to create a better experience for our customers and a more ergonomic workplace for our co-workers,” he said in a statement.
Wiliot links gen AI and IoT for conversational supply chain bot
The intermingling between generative AI and other technologies—like drones, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics and more—is becoming increasingly prevalent. Wiliot, an IoT company that works with retailers on supply chain and asset management, is one of the latest companies to get on the wave.
On August 20, the startup announced it had launched a generative AI chatbot, called WiliBot. The technology combines physical assets associated with a product with intelligent recommendations and natural language capabilities to allow employees to ask questions about products at points throughout the supply chain.
Wiliot already uses “stamp-sized, self-powered IoT pixels affixed to products, packaging, containers, crates, pallets and more…[to] communicate via Bluetooth information such as location, temperature, humidity and carbon footprint to the Wiliot cloud where businesses analyze the data.”
By combining generative AI and machine learning with the existing technology, the system can notify employees of supply chain happenings, which in turn allows businesses to manually correct anything that may be unsatisfactory or dangerous throughout the logistics and package-handling processes.
They can also use WiliBot to ask questions like, “What is the carbon footprint of this product, and why is it so low or so high?” or “Which product should I stock next, and why?”
Wiliot’s CEO, Tal Tamir, said marrying IoT and generative AI just made sense as clients’ demand for supply chain visibility increases and evolves.
“Ambient IoT and generative AI are increasingly symbiotic technologies,” Tamir said in a statement. “Ambient IoT generates vast amounts of data about trillions of everyday things, and gen AI can uniquely make sense of all that data. On the flipside, gen AI 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 gen AI platform like WiliBot—and others—can use to describe products, materials, supply chains, and everything connected to the internet.”
Indian textile company intros new brand ambassador
AI-generated models, which have been received with mixed sentiment by consumers and the industry, may be continuing to expand their reach.
Indian apparel company Seematti Textiles, which sells a variety of traditional Indian fashion, including sarees and churidar sets, announced last week it had introduced a new kind of brand ambassador: one fully powered by AI.
The brand has named its newly created spokesperson Isha Ravi, and the AI-generated ambassador has her own Instagram account, @wanderwithisha, where she shows off Seematti’s apparel in locations around the world. The account features both image and video content, where Isha speaks directly to consumers.
The company’s CEO, Beena Kannan, said she expects the development of Isha Ravi to encourage innovation throughout the company’s fashion sphere.
“For the first time in India, an AI model is becoming the ambassador of a fashion brand,” she said in a statement. “We should view this historic moment as a step into a new era of fashion and as the beginning of future fashion revolutions.”
According to the company, its AI creation will be able to assist consumers within a few months. The New Indian Express reported that users will be able to ask Isha questions about specific products, use the system to show how products look on her and more. While the languages Isha uses are currently limited to Malayalam and English, Seematti anticipates expanding that range as it continues to develop the technology.
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