GPS can tell you which building you’re in. It has no idea which floor, hallway or room — nor where equipment sits or how people move about — because satellites can’t see past a roofline. Indoor spaces have effectively been off the map, and those dead zones are where a lot of hybrid work strategies, digital transformation budgets and AI ambitions stall.
Many teams assume solving that means building something new: a dedicated network, specialized sensors, another system to fund and maintain. In reality, enterprise-class wireless access points pick up the same kind of signal that indoor location data is built from. The data itself doesn’t exist yet, but the network capable of producing it does.
For IT, operations and facilities leaders, that changes the math. Leveraging Wi-Fi for indoor GPS-like capabilities means new visibility without additional complexity. It also means AI and automation systems finally get real-time context, improving outcomes and ROI.
Converging trends call for location data
Indoor location data isn’t new, but several trends are fueling demand for it, starting with hybrid work. Office utilization hit 53% in 2025, its highest level since before the pandemic, and the average organization now assigns 111 people for every 100 seats, according to CBRE.
AI, meanwhile, has become foundational to enterprise success, according to Deloitte, and it depends on real-time, physical-world context. A system built to optimize schedules or spaces can’t act on what it can’t locate.
Leaders feel that gap daily. Facilities budgets pay to heat, cool and maintain empty rooms. Security teams push for faster incident response. AI pilots stall because they can’t tell what’s happening on the floor.
These problems span departments that rarely work together. “Traditionally, IT took care of the network, and the operations team had a different solution to solve its own problems,” said Anilash Azeez, product manager at HPE. “They were silos.” The pandemic brought “kings of their own kingdoms” to the same table, he said.
Meeting that shared need no longer requires a complex, costly deployment. The Wi-Fi already installed in most buildings can produce the data, an opportunity many organizations overlook.
What indoor location data makes possible
Asset visibility is one of the clearest wins. In U.S. hospitals, nurses spend up to an hour per shift searching for equipment, costing billions annually in lost productivity, 24x7 Magazine reports. Healthcare facilities also overbuy equipment because they can’t confirm what they own.
On the factory floor, location data lowers costs and raises output. One electric vehicle manufacturer built asset tracking on its existing wireless infrastructure, cutting deployment costs roughly in half. With visibility into material movement, it raised production from 280 vehicles a month to a steady 320. “That's a significant return on investment,” Azeez said. Tool tracking matters too. “If someone leaves a tool inside a car after fixing a door, it’s now a quality assurance issue,” he added.
In offices, the same Wi-Fi can run wayfinding, desk booking and occupancy analytics tied to lighting and climate control. In stores, shoppers can get a personalized offer upon joining the Wi-Fi, then navigate straight to an item on the shelf.
Location data also strengthens safety. When the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office modernized its Wi-Fi network with HPE, location data came included. Investigators can now cross-reference a person, device or asset with a date and time across more than 100,000 records, shrinking investigations from days to minutes.
Choosing a foundation that scales
Physical-world context is now a core input for strategic initiatives. Its value only grows as AI efforts expand, so the solution you choose today shapes what’s possible tomorrow. A system that only solves today’s use case can force a rip-and-replace investment later. An open-standards approach, built on shared industry specifications instead of one vendor’s proprietary technology, keeps those options open.
“If you buy a proprietary solution from one vendor, you’re locked in,” Azeez said. With open standards, organizations can pair one vendor’s location software with another’s devices, “and it all still works.” That choice extends to sharing location data across applications and partners, enabling more flexibility, faster innovation, and lower long-term costs.
Start with the business problem. “Rather than finding a technology and then chasing a problem, define what you’re trying to improve in your business,” Azeez advised. And resist chasing specifications. Buyers often demand centimeter-level accuracy they have no use for. “What do you want to do with it?” Azeez asks them. “Often they don’t know.”
When vetting solutions, Azeez recommends weighing four things:
- A broad partner ecosystem lets you choose apps and devices suited to your industry and compliance requirements.
- Integration through open APIs lets location data feed the systems you already run, from building management to AI agents, instead of staying in a vendor’s dashboard.
- Scalability determines whether new use cases build on the first investment or require another. On an AI-native network, self-driving capabilities that detect and fix connectivity problems can monitor location services too, catching disruptions before they affect operations.
- Support for multiple location technologies lets you match precision to the job, whether that’s guiding a visitor to a conference room or finding a tool on an assembly line.
From there, pilot one use case with a concrete metric, such as time to locate an asset. Getting the foundation right early turns indoor location into a competitive advantage that grows with the business.
Tracking your next advantage
What once required overlay networks and specialized infrastructure can now run on the enterprise network itself, making indoor location easier and less costly to deploy. Leave that capability unused, and strategic decisions keep resting on assumptions instead of real-world context.
For IT leaders, it’s a compelling pitch for the rest of the business: capabilities colleagues have long wanted, but couldn’t budget for, are now within reach on the network the organization already owns. As that wish list grows, Azeez concludes, “You get more for less.”
Explore what’s possible with indoor location intelligence, powered by a self-driving HPE Wi-Fi network.
