NI Connect 2026: The Latest Updates on NI’s AI Advisor Nigel

NI Connect is the premier annual conference for Emerson Test and Measurement / NI. This year’s conference is located in Fort Worth, Texas, and celebrates 50 years of NI innovation as well as 40 years of LabVIEW. With part of the Apex Waves team attending this year’s milestone event, we are offering a firsthand look into some of the most exciting announcements that are being made! In this post, we will take a look at the announcements made during the opening keynote address regarding Nigel™, NI’s revolutionary test and measurement AI tool.

Nigel as an Advisor

As one of the most rapidly advancing technologies of our time, AI has been disrupting the way people approach test and measurement. In response, Emerson has been investing in the NI platform to ensure that it is ready for AI. As a result, the NI platform is the most widely adopted and AI-ready platform in the industry!

Named after the original National Instruments eagle mascot, Nigel is tuned specifically for embracing AI with test and measurement. Unlike general-purpose platforms, it is designed for the development of testing applications, utilizing five decades of NI innovation to provide insights, automation, and contextual support. Nigel also stands apart from other platforms with its commitment to security. Its general architecture is deployed on Emerson’s secure cloud operations platform, and it is hosted on Microsoft Azure. NI assures that data is kept locally on your device and is neither utilized to train models nor saved by Nigel. All network traffic is also securely encrypted (TLS).

Nigel as an Author

Nigel has already come a long way since its official release date was announced at last year’s conference. This summer, the LabVIEW+ software will be adding additional capabilities for the AI. While it was operating mainly as an advisor until now, the new capabilities announced during this year’s opening keynote will allow Nigel to create code, improve data analytics, and operate as an author.

These upcoming capabilities include the development of a plugin for FlexLogger and the ability to use Nigel with DAQmx Code. One of the advantages of using LabVIEW is that its graphical nature is much easier to debug than text-based code. With Nigel’s new coding abilities, users can pair the benefits of a large and specifically trained LLM with vibe coding.

Another pain point that Nigel will soon be able to help users address is organizing raw data. To demonstrate this during the keynote, a trombone was briefly played into a microphone to create an acoustic test demo. Using Nigel within SystemLink, all of the raw data from the audio test was quickly transformed into an organized and color-coded chart. Nigel allows users to ask in-depth questions about raw data that is often difficult to read. If an anomaly is spotted with the data, users can quickly create action items and tag specific team members to address it.

From code generation to data analytics, Nigel is rapidly evolving to better address the needs of entire workflows. These updates will be available on July 28th, 2026.

Nigel as an Agent

One of the most exciting announcements regarding Nigel was given near the end of the keynote. In addition to functioning as both an advisor and author within test and measurement applications, Nigel will soon go beyond internal test systems to operate as an agent. Built on a foundation of NI’s test and measurement expertise, hardware/software, and contextual data, Nigel will evolve from being embedded into one specific workflow to working natively across LabVIEW and SystemLink applications.

REVOLUTIONIZING TEST PLANNING

One of the first steps for a validation engineer is to read the test plan and dig through documentation. This can be a tedious process that takes a long time to ensure it is done correctly. With Nigel’s upcoming abilities as an AI agent, it will be able to read and design a test plan, make recommendations, and ask follow-up questions to get more context. It can connect to everything without the need for additional prompts, eliminating the frustration of teaching tools how to interact with each other. Security is still paramount, and Nigel takes multiple steps to avoid creating hallucinations. Conversations with Nigel will “follow” the user everywhere and can be accessed regardless of the tool or agent being used.

Nigel will be able to update your test plan and documentation to reflect what you’re choosing in real-time, with the option to take over and edit the document at the same time. What used to take hours will soon just take minutes!

By connecting to industry-leading AI models such as GPT or Claude, Nigel will allow you to choose whichever language is the best for the job. It can even switch models mid-task. In regard to their experience tackling a project that originally took 20 hours and took just 20 minutes with Nigel, one NI technician said, “I can now do things with NIGEL that I could only imagine before.”

Nigel’s user interface is fully customizable, allowing users to build in seconds because it knows how to communicate directly with NI hardware. For example, gRPC drivers allow for remote connection between Nigel and a PXI module.

When it comes to debugging and analysis, one of the most impressive aspects is that Nigel will soon be able to overlay historical data with current live data in order to make comparisons. These results can be instantly shared with your team or printed.

AI acceleration is quickly becoming the new normal for test development, and Nigel is specifically designed to embrace this future of innovation. We can’t wait to see the impact these latest updates have when they are released on July 28th and beyond!