Last month, Sam, Chris and Dave from our team headed to Safe Software’s Peak of Data Integration and AI Conference in Seattle. We had a great time catching up with all the latest developments and seeing familiar faces. Now we’ve had some time to digest our top takeaways, here are some insights from the conference. There’s a lot of exciting new tech and we want to break it down into what that means for our partners and customers.

Biggest ‘wow’ moment 

Our friends at Avineon Tensing shared an amazing story about using FME and Google Gemini AI to extract handwritten data from over a century of electrical service records — that’s about a million records. 

FME orchestrated the entire process, from cataloguing scanned records, to encoding the images and generating a prompt for Gemini to extract dates. Around 19 years of projected manual processing was reduced to 26 hours, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds. 

Top 4 Functionality Highlights:

Develop APIs on top of any system without custom code

Build web applications or dashboards on top of all your systems and get real-time access to any data source, without moving or duplicating data. Your FME team will now be able to develop APIs with no custom code.

The new Data Virtualization feature enables FME to wrap any system or database in your enterprise with OpenAPI-compliant REST APIs. The Role-Based-Access-Control (RBAC) already in FME Flow is leveraged so you can publish secure APIs from your FME platform with fine grained permissions based on the user.

Data virtualization is available across the FME platform (FME Flow, FME Flow Hosted, FME Flow Remote Engine Service). With Data Virtualization deployed to a Remote Engine Service, you can integrate on-premise data with the cloud securely in an OpenAPI format.

The FME platform also leverages an any-AI-model, meaning you can bring your AI service of choice into your FME solution and publish AI-ready OpenAPI REST endpoints. 

Experience your data directly with spatial computing (FME Realize)

FME Realize is an augmented reality application that brings the spatial computing power of the FME Platform to life. Designed for field workers and mobile teams, it delivers real-time, in-context access to data.

An emerging standard: MCP format

Anthropic’s model context protocol (MCP) is a popular framework in this area. This open protocol lets developers expose data and functionalities required by agents in a standard format.

As an emerging standard, MCP enables use of FME to surface information in a standard so it can be easily consumed by LLMs. This gives organisations the ability to use FME to train their own AI services on their own internal data.

FME has native connectivity to all major AI providers and has adopted an any-AI approach enabling FME developers to build their solutions using their preferred AI service.

An example use case would be: A utility or local council has an asset management system with databases in the backend. Their asset management team can now wrap it in FME, expose it to their LLM and get answers to questions like ‘how many poles do we have in our network?’, or ‘which poles need to be tested this month?’.

AI Assistance now available in FME Form

An AI assistant that helps you build things better. This is best for newer users who are getting started, to learn as they build and get to proficiency faster. It’s also great for experienced developers who can now deliver solutions even faster with AI Assisted FME Form workspace development. This is a generative AI for scripting within FME Workspace; for when you need to author a python or sql script within FME.

What does this mean for our FME License customers?

For our FME License customers, all of these new features are available with your current licensing. FME doesn’t have a modular license model, where additional and new features need to be purchased on top of your existing license. This means you can leverage the power of Data Virtualization, Spatial Computing, AI Assist and all the new features and benefits now, at no additional cost.

Software Lifecycle and Upgrades

Keeping your FME Platform secure and up to date has never been easier.  With a Seamless Subscription you stay evergreen with minimal disruption, as we take care of patching and upgrades for you.

FME users will now be able to access the latest features sooner, and be protected by the latest security updates, with minimal disruption.

Benefits for FME users in Local Government and Utilities

• Accelerate your digital transformation and cloud journey by wrapping legacy software and databases with REST APIs using data virtualisation.
• Rapidly assess data quality by empowering field teams to overlay asset information, safety notes and work instructions using AR.
• Expand your AI roadmap using natural language processing against datasets long buried in the backroom, with MCP standards.
• Ask your systems natural language questions like “Which assets haven’t been serviced in over 2 years?” or “Will we exceed our maintenance budget this quarter?” without needing complex reports.
• Make bulletproof FME workspaces and level up your development skills using AI assist.