Retail is undergoing a transformation that has nothing to do with chatbots—and everything to do with scale, signals, and the physical world. In this episode of the Mr. Beacon Podcast, we sit down with Thaddeus Segura, Senior Vice President of Product at Vusion, the global leader in electronic shelf labels (ESLs), to unpack the massive, but often overlooked, IoT revolution happening inside stores right now.
With deployments reaching tens of millions of devices per year and more than 100,000 connected labels in a single store, Vusion is quietly building one of the largest ambient IoT networks on the planet. Thaddeus explains why electronic shelf labels are far more than digital price tags, and how they’ve become a strategic platform for dynamic pricing, omnichannel fulfillment, planogram compliance, retail media, computer vision, and real-time store intelligence.
We explore why Europe adopted ESLs years ahead of the U.S., how labor economics and sustainability drove early adoption, and why Walmart’s nationwide rollout marks a true inflection point for American retail. Thaddeus also breaks down Vusion’s EdgeSense architecture, which are shared radios, shared batteries, and location-aware rails, and why this design unlocks entirely new use cases without overwhelming power budgets or wireless channels.
Beyond pricing, we dive into pick-to-light fulfillment, Bluetooth-powered wayfinding, battery-operated computer vision, light harvesting, and why AI can’t work without better physical-world inputs. As Thaddeus puts it, before retailers can become “agentic,” they must first understand what’s actually happening inside their stores.
If you want to understand where retail, IoT, and AI truly intersect (not in theory, but at global scale) this conversation is essential listening.
Mister Beacon is hosted by Steve Statler, CEO of ambientChat.ai — Using AI to connect people with places and products with an app that puts you in control of YOUR data.
Our sponsor is Identiv https://www.identiv.com, whose IoT solutions create digital identities for physical objects, enhancing global connectivity for businesses, people, and the planet. We are also sponsored by Blecon http://www.blecon.net. Blecon enables physical products to communicate with cloud applications using Bluetooth Low Energy.