Far from an expert, but I THINK the P1 ports are more of a European thing (I certainly don’t have one on any of my meters here in the US).
I’ve never used AI on the edge, but from what I gather it works pretty well as long as you have clearly visible numbers. I also did not have this on my gas meter (the cover was QUITE yellowed/distorted since it’s read electronically and no one actually looks at it.
A lot of folks also have a magnet on the number part that can be picked up with a hall effect sensor as it rotates. I tried this method but my meter didn’t seem to have any magnets (from what I could tell the little bit I was comfortable taking it apart, it looked like there was a mechanical linkage that picked up usage info for electronic reading).
In my case I stumbled upon folks using a magnetometer (qmc5883l in my case) to sense the movement of the diaphragm (which your meter is/has). Set it up and it’s worked amazingly well ever since.
Edit: forgot to mention sniffing OTA signals from the meter. Also tried this but (presumably) all of my meters encrypt the signal as I wasn’t able to pick anything useable up. I assume this is common practice now and only folks that had meters installed as remote reading was just becoming a thing have unencrypted data being thrown around.