Why I Left Wiliot to Launch AmbAI
Last week I left Wiliot. After seven+ incredible years as the first employee outside of Israel and the core founding / R&D team, it feels like I've just jumped out of an airplane climbing to high altitude – exhilarating, purposeful and a little scary.
Crisis of confidence in the mission? Far from it! I'm exercising and buying my Wiliot stock, keeping my WILIOT number plate, and launching a new venture, AmbAI.ai. My co-founders and I are building on Wiliot technology and the mentorship of Wiliot's founders to take ambient intelligence in an exciting new direction.
This decision may surprise people who follow Wiliot. You've likely heard me champion battery-free Bluetooth and ambient intelligence (recently highlighted in Gartner's 2025 trends report) as game-changers for retail, supply chains, food safety, drug efficacy, and climate action. The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Time, Fast Company, CNBC, and RFID Journal have all documented Wiliot's remarkable progress.
I'm leaving precisely because I'm more convinced than ever of this vision. While the companies manufacturing tags and building cloud platforms will create enormous value, I believe some of the biggest opportunities lie in developing applications that transform how businesses and consumers interact with the physical world.
The Next Frontier: Connecting AI to the Physical World
Wiliot is rightly focusing upstream, helping global enterprises illuminate their supply chains. Real-time inventory visibility in distribution centers and store backrooms is a vast goldmine and a critical foundation for downstream innovation. But closer to the end customer, there's another frontier emerging: the intersection of ambient intelligence and AI agents. This is the opportunity We are pursuing at AmbAI.
Your products should have a voice, they have stories to tell – about their origin, their journey, and how they've been handled. At Wiliot, we've uncovered insights about products that were previously invisible. The future Ambient IoT browser AI Agent (AmbAI for short) will display digital product passports capturing this information, but in a world where every micro-location (e.g. restaurant table), product, and component can communicate, AI agents become essential. They'll distill this tsunami of data into delightful experiences that empower customers, enable better-informed choices, and create personalized interactions based on a comprehensive understanding of individual preferences across all retail touchpoints.
Beyond Web-Based AI
OpenAI's Operator is impressive – it can book event tickets and order pizza online. But it's incomplete. Today's Large Language Models primarily process text and video, and they're running out of reliable web data. Meanwhile, the physical world contains orders of magnitude more information than what's currently online or captured in video streams. We're talking about an internet of trillions of things: food, medicine, clothing, windows, wine, and food trucks – each with its own story. ABI Research estimates this total addressable market at 5-10 trillion things, dwarfing today's Internet of Things (< 50 billion connected devices). AI is like a brain in a jar – it's time to open the lid and connect it to reality.
The Vision: Omniscient AI for Good
We're building a network and applications that enable AI and robots to understand the complete story of every product – its origin, handling, carbon footprint, and true cost. This information can be literally life-saving (for vaccines/insulin) or life-threatening (consider recent food contamination outbreaks). But beyond safety, imagine the experiences possible when AI agents can tap into a network of information about places and things. The right AI agent can:
- Guide choices that reduce global cruelty
- Accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy
- Tell the story of your meal better than any sommelier
- Seamlessly order your usual coffee when lines are long
When products can directly communicate consumption patterns and replenishment needs to manufacturers, it will make the disruption of BOPIS (buy-online-pick-up-in-store) look like a tremor before an earthquake.
Privacy and Responsibility
With great power comes great responsibility. This new world demands pragmatic privacy approaches that protect data flowing from our most intimate spaces – your drinks cabinet, medicine cabinet, underwear drawer, and pantry. We must use AI to give people and each supply chain participant "Privacy Control" of their data. People aren't products, we will treat them as customers and owners rather than Matrix style data sources being plugged in, milked and manipulated. Our mission is to make this technology work for all stakeholders, not just Fortune 500 shareholders.
Looking Forward
For Wiliot, 2025 marks the end of the beginning of an amazing journey, with their best chapters still ahead. For AmbAI, we're in fundraising mode, and the interest is encouraging. If Wiliot's story is as compelling as "Breaking Bad," then I hope AmbAI can match the brilliance of "Better Call Saul."