For nearly 50 years, NI has sold engineers a stubbornly useful idea: the instrument is better when software calls the shots. Now the company has Emerson's scale, an AI assistant named Nigel and the harder task of modernizing without breaking the systems customers already trust.

From a manufacturing floor in Singapore to Emerson's executive office, Vidya Ramnath has spent three decades learning how industrial technology works - and how to make its value understood.