How is Avery Dennison Scaling Physical AI?

Avery Dennison announced a $75 million minority investment in Wiliot on April 27, 2026, expanding a partnership built around the premise that every physical item in a supply chain should be capable of generating and transmitting data about itself in real time.

Wiliot's technology including passive Bluetooth Low Energy tags that harvest ambient radio frequency energy to power themselves without batteries enables continuous condition monitoring and location tracking across products, pallets, and shipments.

The company describes its category as Physical AI: intelligence embedded in physical objects rather than residing in centralized systems.

Avery Dennison, which has built market leadership in RFID-based digital identification for physical items, is using the investment to expand its sensing technology portfolio into BLE as a complementary capability alongside RFID.

"BLE is a complementary technology to RFID," said Francisco Melo, President of Intelligent Labels Technologies and Digital Solutions at Avery Dennison. "It increases the total addressable market and allows us to provide a broader set of solutions for improved visibility and condition monitoring for our customers, unlocking important data sets not possible before."

The $75 million investment comes with a structural commitment that goes beyond capital. Avery Dennison will serve as Wiliot's preferred inlay design, manufacturing, and commercial partner, a designation that gives Avery Dennison direct involvement in how Wiliot's technology reaches the market at scale.

The company also gains a seat on Wiliot's Board of Directors, adding to an existing Board Observer position, which gives it governance influence over the direction of the technology, according to the press release.

Joint go-to-market efforts will focus on retail, logistics, and food, three industries where the requirement for accurate, sensor-derived data is accelerating alongside AI adoption.

As businesses increasingly rely on AI to automate supply chain decisions, the quality and timeliness of the underlying sensor data becomes a direct constraint on what AI systems can do.

Wiliot's battery-free BLE tags address that constraint by enabling continuous data generation at a unit cost and form factor that makes deployment at item level commercially viable.

Tal Tamir, Co-founder and CEO of Wiliot, described Avery Dennison as the partner with the scale required to realize accelerating demand for Physical AI. "This investment from Avery Dennison and growing partnership across our teams is transformational for the adoption of Physical AI," he said.