RFID Enabled Interfering Smart Shelf

Filed in 2005 (20 years ago) and granted in 2007, our team’s US 7,271,724 – “Interfering Smart Shelf” used tunable, shelf-embedded RFID to sense out-of-stocks on-shelf. Foil-wrapped items naturally blocked reads—readers reported unreadable tags positioned under the shelf, NOT on the individual items. We had low stock/OOS alerts in real-time (no cameras needed). Why share now? Two reasons: (1) ChatGPT found the patent today, and (2) adding a POV to the current AI-powered image recognition conversation. Those tools are powerful—but they’re not always the best first mile. In many categories, store-level POS anomaly detection gets ~80–90% of the way there without the cost/latency of photos. If you’re exploring retail execution solutions and interested in Thinking Beyond the Store Visit —DM me. hashtag#RFID hashtag#ThinkingBeyondTheStoreVisit hashtag#GenAI hashtag#OnShelfAvailability hashtag#RetailExecution hashtag#CPG hashtag#AgenticAI hashtag#Accenture

Filed in 2005 (20 years ago) and granted in 2007, our team’s US 7,271,724 – “Interfering Smart Shelf” used tunable, shelf-embedded RFID to sense out-of-stocks on-shelf. Foil-wrapped items naturally blocked reads—readers reported unreadable tags positioned under the shelf, NOT on the individual items. We had low stock/OOS alerts in real-time (no cameras needed).Why share now? Two reasons: (1) ChatGPT found the patent today, and (2) adding a POV to the current AI-powered image recognition conversation. Those tools are powerful—but they’re not always the best first mile. In many categories, store-level POS anomaly detection gets ~80–90% of the way there without the cost/latency of photos.If you’re exploring retail execution solutions and interested in Thinking Beyond the Store Visit —DM me. hashtag#RFIDhashtag#ThinkingBeyondTheStoreVisithashtag#GenAIhashtag#OnShelfAvailabilityhashtag#RetailExecutionhashtag#CPGhashtag#AgenticAIhashtag#AccentureCo-inventors: @Amit Goyal Ian Rosenblum @Jaimin Soni Ahmed F. Hassan