Emerson is making more plans for Nigel

According to Emerson, the addition of code generation and cross-platform intelligence open up the AI technology for specialist, mission-critical users, e.g aerospace, transportation, automotive and semiconductor design engineers to develop and test products meeting strict reliability and safety requirements.

Caroline Hayes met Kevin Shultz, CTO of Technology & Innovation at Emerson’s offices in Austin, Texas. Speaking ahead of the Nigel AI announcement, he said: “I have never seen a technology moving at the rate that AI is moving”.

He believes this technological revolution shifted when the concept of large language models (LLMs) was introduced about five years ago. It is a change that Emerson has embraced, he continues, and, just as with PCs and mobile phones before this, it is finding a way that it can help engineers and scientists as quickly as possible.

“This technology wave . . . it’s a tsunami,” he says. In his first AI keynote at the company’s NI Connect in 2024, he recalled was “half right” about the rate of change AI would bring; about half of the progress went a lot faster than he ever imagined.

The company first integrated Nigel, its AI adviser to LabView and TestStand and NI test and measurement software in July 2025. It was introduced to help customers get more information and insights from their data, allowing them to make design decisions faster, Shultz explained. This is more traditional AI, but there is also generative AI, he said, which can help with more standard tasks, such are reading long documents to quickly find points or interest and detail.

“The vast majority of our systems can be classified as mission-critical. . .  In the old days, we say take measurements, not estimates, right? . . . We need to make sure that AI is there to assist the expert, but it doesn’t do the job for the expert,” he said. “The expert still has to make every decision. It has to be engineer-led.”

“Even if I have been programming LabView for 20 years, give me a Labview code that I hadn’t written or seen, AI can quickly tell me ‘here’s your inputs, here’s your outputs, here’s what it looks like’. I still have to look through it, but it can assist me in my job,” he clarified. It also automates and accelerates operation, from looking at specs, searching databases and recommending hardware as well as analysing VIs.

“We’ve taken a leadership position,” continued Shutlz, “Customers get answers that are T&M-centric, with T&M expertise on top of world-class LLMs and not generic LLM that’s designed for any type of question.”

The enhancements announced at NI Connect are expected to be available later this year. Nigel AI will also be introduced across the company’s full software portfolio, including NI FlexLogger, NI InstrumentStudio, NI TestStand and NI SystemLink. 

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