ST. LOUIS—Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how people access and interpret economic data, creating both new opportunities and new risks for one of the central bank’s most widely used public tools.
Speaking at FRED Con 2026 in St. Louis, Waller called the Federal Reserve Economic Data platform, known as FRED, one of the most important public services created by the Federal Reserve.
FRED currently hosts more than 850,000 data series from government agencies and other sources around the world and reached 18 million unique users in 2025, Waller said.
The platform has evolved alongside changes in technology for more than six decades. Its origins date to 1961, when the St. Louis Fed distributed a typed weekly digest of economic data. FRED later moved to telephone access, computer bulletin boards and, in 1995, the web.
Now, Waller said, artificial intelligence is opening another chapter.
AI systems can search, summarize and visualize large quantities of data faster than individual users and can help explain complex economic concepts to broader audiences. But those same tools can also hallucinate, introduce bias, misstate assumptions or cite data incorrectly.
Waller said FRED is already seeing the effect of AI on its traffic.
Traffic to FRED is growing about 150% a year, he said, with much of the increase coming from AI agents and bots. About half of visits now come from AI systems retrieving data, while the other half come from human users.
That shift is prompting the St. Louis Fed to redesign parts of the platform for machines as well as people.
Waller announced the FRED MCP Connector, which uses the Model Context Protocol to allow users to connect FRED data directly with AI systems. The goal is to help AI agents retrieve economic data in a more accurate and well-documented way.
He said FRED staff are also working to help AI systems better understand economic concepts and to create stronger links among the Fed’s data and historical archives.
That effort includes connections to ALFRED, which stores earlier versions of economic data, and FRASER, the Federal Reserve’s archive of historical documents.
Waller also said users seeking certain data published by the Federal Reserve Board will soon be routed directly to FRED and its tools.
The changes reflect a broader challenge for economic-data providers as artificial intelligence becomes a larger intermediary between original data sources and the public.
Waller said FRED’s value ultimately rests on trust: users expect the platform to reproduce data accurately and consistently, regardless of how that information is accessed.
“Our market economy depends on information,” Waller said, arguing that trusted economic data will remain essential even as the technologies used to access it continue to change.