AiFi Partners with Microsoft

The collaboration brings together AiFi’s spatial intelligence and Microsoft’s cloud scale to help enterprises better understand real-world interactions and bridge digital and physical experiences.

AiFi has announced a collaboration with Microsoft that promises the delivery of real-world artificial intelligence. Built on Microsoft Azure, this integration taps AiFi’s proprietary spatial intelligence engine, trained on over 90 petabytes of real-world data collected annually. 

Unlike conventional vision systems, AiFi creates a real-time, context-aware digital twin that doesn’t just see what’s happening; it understands where it’s happening, who’s involved, when, and why it matters.

“Understanding the physical world with precision is the next frontier of AI,” said Steve Carlin, CEO at AiFi. 

“That’s what this collaboration is about. By combining AiFi’s spatial intelligence with Microsoft’s cloud scale and enterprise reach, we’re enabling AI to help businesses understand everything that is happening in the spaces that matter to them.” 

“Working with Microsoft gives a startup like ours an opportunity to take advantage of cost structures associated with scale, and gives Microsoft the ability to access new capabilities for their agentic layer strategies for their cloud services and analytics.”

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In a retail setting, AiFi’s system can detect when a customer sees an object, picks it up, studies it, and puts it back, identifying not just the object, but the human interaction and the spatial context in real-time. 

This allows shoppers to anonymously purchase items in-store without having to wait in line, stop to scan or pay. It doesn’t use facial recognition or capture biometric identifiers to ensure the privacy of individuals.

“Spatial intelligence is becoming a foundational layer of enterprise AI, especially as organisations look to bridge physical and digital experiences,” said Jason Graefe, CVP of ISV & Digital Natives at Microsoft. 

“AiFi’s dataset and proven performance make them an ideal partner for bringing real-time intelligence into complex, real-world settings.”

As a longtime participant in the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus programme and a global ISV partner, AiFi has benefited from technical collaboration with Microsoft’s engineering and industry teams.

While retail remains a key early use case, helping retailers reallocate labour and unlock shopper insights, the pair stated that the broader opportunity lies in any environment where understanding human behaviour and physical interaction in real-time can drive business outcomes.

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