A platform using standard smartphones gives retailers real-time location data across store floors, with no hardware installed.
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, September 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Retailers have spent two years making their digital operations legible to machines. Product catalogs, pricing, and inventory are now structured so software can read them. Systems can query stock levels, calculate optimal pricing, and route online orders without a person in the loop. The physical store, where most retail revenue is still generated, remains unreadable.
This is not a data problem in the way retailers usually think about data problems. It is not about collecting more information or cleaning up what already exists. It is about a category of information that was never captured in the first place. Retailers hold catalog data, price data, and inventory data. Almost none hold spatial data: where a product physically sits on a shelf, where a picker is standing relative to an order, where a piece of equipment is inside a 150,000-square-foot building. A system can detect that an item is missing from a shelf and still have no way to route a person to the right place to act on it. Detection has been solved. Direction has not.
The consequences show up in operations rather than in dashboards, which is part of why the problem has persisted this long. A picker walks an extra aisle because the system knows an item exists somewhere in the store but not where. An associate works from memory or from a paper planogram because the app on their phone can tell them what to do but not where to go to do it. An item gets recorded as unavailable and the sale is lost, even though the product is physically in the building, simply not found in time. Individually, each of these is a minor inefficiency, the kind of thing that gets absorbed into “the way things are.” Across every order, every shift, and thousands of stores, the cost compounds into missed sales, wasted labor hours, and a ceiling on what any AI or automation initiative can actually do inside a physical location.
That ceiling is the part retailers are beginning to run into directly. Many have already built or bought the software layer meant to sit on top of store operations: task management systems, computer vision for shelf monitoring, AI-driven fulfillment tools. Nearly all of it assumes the system already knows where things are. When that assumption is wrong, the tools built on top of it underperform quietly, producing recommendations no one can act on quickly, or requiring workarounds that erode the efficiency they were meant to create.
Oriient, a software-only indoor location platform, is now live across more than 6,000 stores globally, covering 850 million square feet, accurate to within one meter, with no equipment installed in any location.
“Every retailer we talk to has a list of what they want AI to do in the store. Almost none of them have solved the one input the whole list depends on: knowing where things and people actually are. You can’t automate a workflow you can’t locate.”
— Chris Smith, VP of Global Sales, Oriient
Oriient’s platform runs on the phones associates already carry, using sensors already built into standard smartphones, rather than requiring beacons, sensors, or any dedicated hardware installed in the building. The location layer is created in software and deployed the same way any other app update reaches a store: pushed to devices already in associates’ hands. Because nothing physical needs to be installed, deployment is limited by software rollout timelines rather than by installation crews, store downtime, or construction schedules. The same platform went live across more than 300 stores in a single week last month, a pace that would not be possible with any hardware-dependent approach.
“Retail is where we proved it. 6,000+ stores, 850 million square feet, nothing installed in any of them. But the mission is the entire indoor world: every building, anywhere, made readable to the systems that run inside it, for any application.”
— Mickey Balter, Co-Founder & CEO, Oriient
The pattern extends beyond retail. Any indoor environment where digital systems need to understand physical space, hospitals coordinating equipment and staff, warehouses tracking inventory movement, campuses managing wayfinding-adjacent logistics, runs into the same structural gap between what software can read and what physically exists inside a building. Retail is simply the sector where the operational cost of that gap is most visible first, measured in real time through fulfillment speed, labor efficiency, and inventory accuracy.
Oriient is a Google Cloud Partner and works with enterprise retailers across grocery, mass merchandise, and other large-format environments in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
ABOUT ORIIENT
Oriient is a software-only indoor location platform for enterprise retail and large physical spaces. Running on standard smartphones with no dedicated equipment in the building, Oriient gives retailers precise, real-time location context across their stores. Accurate to within one meter and live in more than 6,000 stores globally. Learn more at oriient.me.
Hope Alcocer
Oriient
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