Moving Beyond Exposure: Preparing for 2026
While 2025 was expected to be a year of convergence for AI, IoT, and RFID, it instead became a year of exposure. These technologies achieved a level of capability that revealed deep-seated organizational unpreparedness, highlighting gaps in data quality and operational architecture that must be addressed for true transformation.
Key Highlights
- Data Readiness Gaps: RFID deployments often stall not due to hardware, but because of inconsistent product hierarchies and poor underlying data quality.
- Architecture Bottlenecks: Massively scaling IoT devices has magnified integration challenges, as rigid legacy architectures struggle to handle inconsistent data streams.
- Pilot Purgatory: Most AI initiatives remain in the experimentation phase because they are dropped into old workflows built for manual processes.
- Redesigning for Success: Winners in 2026 will be those who move beyond just deploying hardware to redesigning their entire operational architecture around technology.
- Unified Operational Fabric: Future success depends on merging RFID inputs, IoT telemetry, and AI decisioning into a single, cohesive system.
- Governance and Security: A critical lack of operational redesign and secure guardrails continues to hold back the enterprise-scale rollout of generative AI.
The Vision for Transformation
"The technology did not fail. The organizations around it did. In 2026, the most successful enterprises will be the ones that combine accurate RFID inputs, real-time IoT telemetry, and AI-driven decisioning into a unified operational fabric." — Frank Palermo, COO at NewRocket
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