Federal Reserve Speeches·Oct 1, 2026, 10:00 AM ET

Waller, The Data Version of Godzilla versus Kong: FRED Takes on AI

FRED is recognized as the Federal Reserve's greatest public good, serving as a trusted global resource for economic data access & charting.
FRED has evolved from a 1961 typed digest to a 1995 website, now hosting over 850,000 data series & reaching 18 million unique users in 2025.
The core value of FRED remains providing a consistent, reliable, & non-commercial platform that guarantees accurate data reproduction.
Users seeking specific Federal Reserve Board data will soon be routed to FRED & its tools.
Artificial Intelligence empowers users to find, summarize, & visualize data faster but introduces risks such as hallucinations, bias, & misinterpretation of correlation vs. causation.
FRED traffic is growing at 150 percent annually, with approximately 50 percent of visits now originating from AI agents rather than human users.
The FRED MCP Connector has been introduced to simplify connections between FRED data & AI systems using the Model Context Protocol (BYOAI).
New architecture is being developed to ensure AI agents receive data in a well-documented manner for accurate interpretation.
Efforts are underway to link FRED with FRASER for historical monetary policy documents & ALFRED for data evolution tracking.
The St. Louis Fed & Federal Reserve System remain committed to providing trusted economic data services despite the opportunities & challenges presented by AI.