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By James Poulton | April 2, 2026
Winning Together: Forging a Truly Connected Frontline
Earlier this year, at our Channel Partner Summit, the buzz of excitement was unmistakable. The conversations with our partners, the lifeblood of our ecosystem, consistently circled back to a significant evolution in our industry. For years, we spoke about “enterprise mobility.” Now, the dialogue centers on creating the “Connected Frontline.”
In this episode of our Winning Together series, we discuss how this shift in language signifies a much deeper change in how we think about technology, workflows, and most importantly, people. It prompts a couple questions: what does a truly connected frontline mean, and what new possibilities does it unlock for your business and your employees?
From Disconnected Tasks to Collaborative Workflows
At its core, the connected frontline equips every worker, from the stock room to the store floor, with a digital connection to each other and to their work. We have had connected workers on the frontline for decades, but now we focus our strategy and product lines on delivering a more cohesive set of solutions to support them. This moves beyond just hardware. It involves the integration of hardware, software, services, and AI to create a common platform for frontline communication and collaboration.
Imagine the all-too-familiar announcement echoing through a store: “Cleanup on aisle five.” An associate stops their current task, finds the spill, and then searches for cleaning supplies. This represents a disconnected, inefficient process.
Now, picture this instead: a new wearable badge allows a manager to send a discrete task to the nearest available worker, who receives the notification and accepts the job instantly.
This approach empowers a more agile, multitasking workforce, ensuring team members spend less time searching for information and more time serving customers.
This ability to direct the right worker to the right task at the right time is crucial for creating an agile and efficient frontline. I spoke about this shift away from disruptive, inefficient communication during my recent briefing.
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The Intelligence Inside the Connection
A connected workforce creates the foundation, but on-device intelligence unlocks its true potential. This forms the core of our strategy: using AI to software-differentiate our hardware.
While many AI solutions rely on the cloud, we know our customers worry about the potential latency and data transaction costs. Therefore, we focus on running AI models directly on our mobile devices. This requires specialized hardware including processors with the performance to handle these models.
We also draw upon our deep heritage as a data capture company. We have made significant investments in our camera technology, viewing the camera on the back of a device not just as a tool for taking pictures, but as a rich data sensor.
When an associate points a device at a shelf to scan one barcode, the camera sees the entire context. This includes the width and height of the shelf, every object upon it, and the empty spaces.
Our AI models can process this secondary data in real time to identify additional tasks that may need attention. An augmented reality overlay might then guide the associate, flagging a misplaced item, a replenishment need, or a recalled product that should be removed.
Empowering Your People and Our Partners
This technology directly addresses one of the biggest challenges our customers face: high employee turnover. When we provide tools that make the job easier and more engaging, it improves employee satisfaction.
When turnover does happen, these same tools help a new employee become as proficient as your most seasoned veteran in a fraction of the time. The device guides them, automates tedious checks, and helps them contribute from day one.
We believe that innovation flourishes when it becomes accessible. That’s why we provide the ingredients for our partners and customers to create their own solutions. For example, we launched our AI software development kit (SDK) and made it available for free to the developer community.
To help people get started, we built what we call “blueprints.” These fully functional demo applications for common use cases, such as product recognition or reading text from a box in top-stock, are included in the Showcase App on our devices. We want to see the inventive ways our partners, from ISVs to internal industrial engineering teams, will use these tools to solve problems we haven’t even envisioned yet.
This all comes at a time when we have refreshed our entire mobile computing portfolio, from our tablets to our wearables. A key part of this refresh involves building RFID capabilities into every product line.
For some devices, this means a sled, but for many of our mainline mobile computers, short-range RFID reading now comes as a standard feature. This removes a significant barrier, allowing any organization to begin experimenting with the powerful asset visibility RFID provides without a major upfront investment.
Our technology provides the platform, but our global ecosystem of over 10,000 partners brings it to life. They possess the vertical expertise and deep customer relationships to instantiate these tools into powerful solutions that solve real problems.
The conversations at our Channel Partner Summit left me more excited than ever for the year ahead, as we work together to help our mutual customers digitize, automate, and build the intelligent, connected frontline of the future.
To hear more about our portfolio and the new capabilities we are bringing to market, I invite you to watch my full briefing from the summit.
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