Emerson announced at its annual NI Connect conference on May 13 that NI Nigel AI will gain prompt-based code generation inside the NI LabVIEW+ Suite and will extend across four additional NI software platforms, moving the company's test portfolio toward what it describes as an "AI-ready" unified system.
The expansion brings Nigel AI to NI FlexLogger, NI InstrumentStudio, NI TestStand, and NI SystemLink, adding context-aware guidance at each stage of the test lifecycle, from initial development and reuse to validation and deployment. The enhancements are expected to ship later in 2026.
What's new here is the scope. Previous Nigel releases added AI assistance within discrete tools. This expansion threads a shared intelligence layer across the full NI stack, so an engineer running a validation workflow in TestStand and logging data in SystemLink can access the same context without switching toolchains.
In internal tests, Emerson says engineers using Nigel cut test development and troubleshooting time from days or hours to minutes. The company frames this against a 2023 Financial Times Group survey finding that just 44 percent of test managers reported meeting their priority quality metrics, with 79 percent of leading organizations planning to adopt AI within five years.
The NI platform underpinning Nigel combines modular hardware with a shared data foundation that aggregates environmental conditions, asset health, code versions, and operator data alongside raw measurement signals. Emerson positions this structured data layer as the prerequisite for AI that can perform anomaly detection and root-cause analysis rather than generic text generation. Companies including NVIDIA, Alstom, Valeo, Zap Energy, and Cyth Systems presented at NI Connect keynotes on their use of NI test technologies. No pricing or specific hardware changes were announced alongside the software expansion.
