Fed Governor Waller Addresses AI and Data at FRED Con 2026

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller delivered remarks at FRED Con 2026, an event hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis focused on the themes of trust, artificial intelligence, and data storytelling. The conference, titled "Navigating Trust, AI and Storytelling in a World of Data," brought together participants to examine how emerging technologies are reshaping the way economic information is gathered, interpreted, and communicated.

Waller's address, framed with a playful reference to the classic monster-movie rivalry between Godzilla and Kong, placed the St. Louis Fed's flagship data platform FRED — the Federal Reserve Economic Data database — in direct conversation with the rapidly expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence tools. FRED hosts hundreds of thousands of economic data series used by researchers, policymakers, journalists, and the public worldwide.

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The speech underscores a broader institutional conversation playing out across central banks and government agencies about how AI-driven analytics can complement, challenge, or enhance traditional data infrastructure. Questions of accuracy, transparency, and public trust in machine-generated economic narratives have grown more pressing as large language models become widely accessible to non-specialist users.

By situating FRED within that debate, Waller signaled that the Federal Reserve is actively engaging with the implications of AI for how official economic data is consumed and contextualized — a concern with direct relevance to monetary policy communication and financial literacy. The Fed's willingness to address these themes publicly reflects growing awareness that the credibility of data institutions depends in part on how well they adapt to a technology-saturated information environment.

Continue reading at FRB: Speeches.