Electric guitar pickups have been around for a long time, and the basic design has been pretty much unchanged. Many have tried to improve upon the basic idea of coiled wire around a magnet, and Fishman is no different in this regard.
The Fluence pickup tries to replace the coil wire with thin circuit boards which have the wires embedded in them. Stack many layers and you get coils of conducting wire surrounding the core. Essentially this technology uses modern circuit board and assembly to replace the coil winds. Then, analysis was done on classic pickups to understand their frequency response and this is modelled in a pre-amp circuit that follows the coil. In theory, since the coils are created using modern processes, the reproducibility is much higher than using a coil winding machine. The character of the pickup is then added back using the pre-amp modeling.
I think this is an interesting idea, but isn’t groundbreaking. EMG has been using active preamps and filtering for a while now. The unique aspect of the Fluence is the reference core which should be highly stable and reproducible. But to get the character of classic pickups, you need an active circuit and thus a battery.
For those looking for some unique designs, with possible tailoring to you tone, this may be a viable option. Signature sets seem to include metal and progressive players — those that opt for flatter response and higher output pickups like you may get from EMG and Lace. If you like classic blues tones, it may still be hard to beat a set of classic Alnico pickups that are scatter wound, however.