Emerson Announces Major Updates to Flagship Software at NI Connect
Today at the annual NI Connect conference, Emerson revealed several software announcements, including its anticipated NigelTM AI Advisor for LabVIEW and TestStand.
A single intelligence trained across the NI software suite and built on Emerson’s secure cloud network, the NigelTM AI Advisor is able to analyze code, offer suggestions for changes, and allow users to ask questions in plain language to surface the correct tools across more than 700 functions more quickly. The new feature will be integrated into LabVIEW and TestStand by July 2025 and will be included into most existing licenses providing significant new functionality at no extra cost.
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“We’ve been working on integrating AI and machine learning into our software for many years now,” said Austin Hill, Section Manager of Test Software at Emerson. “Our users will see a clear difference from general purpose AI assistants due to the test specific expertise with which we have trained the NigelTM AI Advisor. We expect to see a step change in productivity for our users from this release, and this is just the beginning – Nigel will just keep getting smarter and better in years to come.”
Reconfirming the company’s commitment to keep the engineer “in the loop,” Hill and team emphasized that use of artificial intelligence must be expert-led and validated in order to meet the high standards for testing across mission critical applications.
SystemLinkTM
At the conference, Emerson also announced the upcoming release of a new, broad base version of SystemLinkTM software, which allows test managers to centralize data and tools in a single platform for greater orchestration and efficiency. With a low price point, and quick set up, the new version of SystemLinkTM will be available later in 2025 to a larger number of users than ever before.
LabVIEW features
The company also unveiled other LabVIEW features, including improved debugging workflow for wires and probes, support for .NET 8.0 and Python 3.12, better VI comparison, connectivity to Docker containers, and the expansion of its free LabVIEW Community Edition to macOS to better serve university students. In addition, Emerson showcased third-party hardware support for InstrumentStudioTM via custom plugins.
At the opening keynote and across several panels, Emerson engineers spoke about the renewed commitment to community input, pointing to the recent open-source GitHub repository for FlexLogger plugins, dedicated support for over 80 user groups, and the 12 “user ideas” implemented in the latest version of LabVIEW that together garnered more than 2000 user kudos votes. To learn more about Emerson’s portfolio of NI software, visit ni.com/software.