NI Connect 2025 introduced the Nigel™ AI Advisor, NI’s new AI-powered tool for test and measurement, to the world. Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Nigel brings a wealth of knowledge about the NI platform to make NI LabVIEW and NI TestStand even more powerful. Let’s talk about seven things to get excited about asking Nigel to do.

1. Find examples—A good example can be a time-saving starting point for a new application, in addition to being a great way to learn coding best practices. Nigel can help you find examples that show you how to set up your application.
2. Provide instructions for specific tasks—Tell Nigel what you want to do in your own words, and the advisor can give you step-by-step instructions for how to complete the task.
3. Get explanations for key concepts—Learning a new software product or how to program in general can sometimes be like learning a new language. Nigel can help make that easier. For example, Nigel can help with topics like the basics of using loops in your application or when to consider using object-oriented programming.
4. Describe the functionality of existing test IP—If you’ve ever inherited code created by someone else, such as a predecessor or a different team, you may struggle to understand what portions of the programming are doing. Nigel can explain the function of different portions of the code.
5. Find the right setting—NI’s highly customizable software offers many options and settings. Nigel can help you quickly find the right dialog box or menu for your NI software without spending time searching on your own.
6. Summarize documentation—Nigel can provide a short summary of long, complex documentation topics to help you grasp the main points more quickly. You can also ask it to cite the sources of the information so you can dig in deeper, as needed.
7. Ask Nigel about NI hardware—Nigel doesn’t just know about software! It can also answer questions about NI hardware, such as connector information or pin functionality, as well as provide general knowledge on test and measurement concepts, like recommended sampling rates to avoid aliasing.

Nigel is integrated into the LabVIEW IDE, making it easily accessible from the menu, toolbar, and Context Help window, as shown in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 1: Nigel is accessible from the VI toolbar.

Figure 2: You can also access Nigel from the Context Help menu.

Nigel is integrated into the TestStand Sequence Editor and is accessible from the toolbar.

Figure 3: Access Nigel from the toolbar.

Nigel is built on Emerson’s secure and robust cloud operations platform. The underlying models used in Nigel are the best-in-class OpenAI models from Microsoft. By using these models, Microsoft makes privacy and security guarantees for the OpenAI APIs we use. Nigel never stores your data or uses it for training large learning models.

Communications between NI’s desktop software products, like LabVIEW and TestStand, and the Nigel cloud service are encrypted traffic with web standard transport layer security (TLS). This traffic is authenticated with a signed certificate (for the cloud), and when communicating with OpenAI models (mtls), both sides use signed certificates to authenticate.

Nigel will make our customers more productive starting with LabVIEW and TestStand 2025 in Q3. We are committed to continuing to augment Nigel with test and measurement expertise. By taking advantage of rapid developments in underlying AI technology, Nigel will learn and improve quickly to accelerate test development, all while keeping our customers in control of their data and IP.