NI’s chief technology officer Kevin Schultz tells Steve Rogerson why this is the best time to be an engineer.

A problem technology has always faced is that as it becomes more complex it also becomes harder to design, manufacture and, importantly, test. The rise in the use and capabilities of AI is no exception. In fact, someone I met this week said it was the biggest change he had seen in his career as an engineer.

That person was Kevin Schultz, chief technology officer at NI, or National Instruments as it used to be called, and is now part of Emerson. He was at NI Days in Birmingham talking about Nigel. Nigel is NI’s AI tool that it is expanding into all its test and measurement products. The event marked the 50th anniversary of the company and the 40th anniversary of LabView, its most famous tool.

Nigel is much younger. It came out last year and has been such a hit with customers battling with the complexities that AI brings, NI is now expanding it into more of its product range with added features and easier integration. Expect further announcements as early as this quarter (www.ni.com/en/shop/software-portfolio/nigel.html).

“This is just the beginning of what we are going to do with Nigel,” said Kevin.

Kevin believes complexity is the biggest engineering challenge today. “I have never seen anything like the speed of development we are seeing today,” he said, which is quite impressive for a guy who started out as a hardware engineer at NI some 35 years ago (www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-schultz-tamu/).

He said AI was the cause of this problem but also the solution, describing it as a key tool to help engineers deal with the design complexity AI brings, whether for IoT networks monitoring thousands of devices up to autonomous helicopters, or for dealing with a myriad of new standards and regulations such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

However, he warned that AI had its own issues at both ends of the scale. The first was for the young engineers looking for easy ways to do things and becoming reliant on AI to the point they don’t learn the foundational skills their careers demand. Secondly are those that are nervous about relying on AI at all. They don’t trust it, are worried it could take their jobs and sometimes find it irritating, in much the same way as Microsoft’s Clippy back in the late 1990s.

Microsoft learned from that experience and eventually withdrew Clippy, thankfully. It is important others developing AI learn that lesson too because Kevin believes AI has moved past the point where people want to experiment with it for AI’s sake. They are now looking to get real value.

“A lot of people feel they need AI but are not sure what for,” he said. “A lot of people are using it incorrectly. We use it to help our own engineers and technicians, and that helps us make sure we are delivering the right tools to other engineers.”

Kevin believes strongly there has never been a better time to be an engineer than right now. “It is exciting,” he said.

He warns though that people should not trust AI blindly. While it helps you, remember that what it produces for you is still your responsibility. His advice is for people to treat AI in the same way they would treat a new engineer joining their team. You let that engineer, whether called Nigel or not, help you with tasks, you give them room to expand what they do, but you also supervise and check their work as they learn. But you never forget you are still responsible for what the junior engineer produces. AI is the same.

“Treat AI like a team member,” he said. “It is still under your control.”

As XTC said in their 1979 song Making Plans for Nigel (www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-X3Wy-svIY or www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=gZjZBCZWxpg&ra=m): “Nigel just needs that helping hand.”