UPDATED 10:30 EDT / MAY 07 2025

AI

SAS ups AI development and governance capabilities

SAS Institute Inc. is using its SAS Innovate 2025 event in Orlando today to introduce a series of enhancements to its Viya cloud-based analytics and artificial intelligence development platform.

They’re aimed at supporting AI agents, improving AI governance and delivering ready-made models for industry-specific tasks. The announcements reflect the company’s continued push to offer enterprise-grade AI tools that balance autonomy with governance.

A new agentic AI framework and governance tools are intended to give customers more control over how AI decisions are made, while prebuilt models and cloud services reduce adoption barriers. SAS unveiled a new agentic AI framework within Viya that allows organizations to design AI agents with varying degrees of autonomy.

The system supports human-in-the-loop oversight, which can be customized based on the complexity of tasks, risk tolerance and business goals. The company said the framework is built on three core pillars: enabling customers to build AI agents that deliver precise and reliable outcomes, determining the appropriate level of AI autonomy and human involvement, and ensuring that agents adhere to ethical values and regulatory standards.

The agents combine deterministic analytics with large language models to deliver explainable, rule-bound outcomes suited for regulated industries. A governance layer enforces ethical standards, privacy compliance and regulatory alignment at the agent level.

SAS plans to extend agentic functionality further by integrating copilot assistants into Viya and releasing prebuilt, industry-specific AI agents for areas such as data engineering and supply chain optimization.

Governance aids

With more than 40% of employees admitting to using AI tools at work in ways that their employers haven’t authorized, governance has become a front-and-center issue. A new AI Governance Map and online assessment tools help companies evaluate their governance maturity across four domains: oversight, compliance, operations and culture. They produce tailored recommendations and benchmarking reports based on peer comparisons.

“Governance is a catalyst for innovation,” said Reggie Townsend, vice president of SAS’ data ethics practice. “Organizations that thrive won’t just be those that deploy AI first, but those that deploy it responsibly.”

SAS also announced the development of a new, unified governance platform that provides oversight and monitoring for AI systems, models and agents. Initially targeted at highly regulated sectors like banking, the platform builds on SAS’ existing Model Risk Management framework with expanded orchestration and compliance capabilities for enterprise AI workflows.

In a parallel announcement, SAS introduced a suite of AI models targeting specific cross-industry business tasks. The models are either pre-trained or offered as pipelines that adapt to customer data. All include documentation to enhance decision transparency.

New models now available include: entity resolution, document analysis, healthcare medication adherence risk, manufacturing supply chain optimization and public sector payment integrity for food assistance and sales tax compliance.

Additional models set to launch later in 2025 will address fraud detection in banking, worker safety monitoring in manufacturing and tax compliance for individual income tax in the public sector. SAS said the models are developed by its data ethics practice and are designed to be easily integrated with customers’ existing information technology systems.

“All models are lightweight and easy to deploy,” said Udo Sglavo, vice president of applied AI and modeling research and development at SAS. “We are turning practical use cases into software you can deploy right away.”

Expanded Viya copilot, plus developer capabilities

SAS also detailed several enhancements to the Viya platform that aim to broaden access to AI development tools, increase productivity, and lower entry barriers.

  • Viya Intelligent Decisioning enables AI agents to be created with controlled levels of autonomy, depending on use case risk and complexity.
  • SAS Data Maker is a synthetic data generation tool that supports data privacy and model training when real data is scarce. It incorporates technology acquired from Hazy Ltd., which SAS acquired last fall, and is expected to be generally available in the third quarter.
  • Viya Essentials is a packaged, managed version of Viya for small and midsized businesses.
  • Viya Copilot is a conversational assistant that speeds up coding, modeling and analytical tasks. Built with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure AI Services, it’s in private preview with public release expected later this year.

Synthetic data is increasingly important in industries where data is tightly regulated or scarce. Ensuring data quality is a priority, said SAS Chief Technology Officer Bryan Harris. “We believe if you’re going to use synthetic data, there is no better way to validate reliability than statistics, and no one is better than SAS at statistics,” he said.

Viya Workbench, a browser-based coding environment for SAS and Python released last year, has been upgraded with support for the R language, SAS Enterprise Guide as an optional integrated development environment, and availability via Azure Marketplace.

SAS said the tools cover full-lifecycle AI development while giving organizations a choice of custom AI or off-the-shelf options.

The company’s customers, particularly in regulated industries such as healthcare, finance and the public sector, now have access to modular tools that can integrate with their existing systems while complying with evolving ethical and regulatory standards. For smaller businesses, the availability of managed services and simplified development tools lowers the technical threshold for AI adoption.

By embedding responsible AI practices into each offering, SAS is positioning itself as a provider focused on accelerating AI while making it trustworthy, transparent and practically useful across diverse enterprise needs.

Photo: SAS

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