The new star on the artificial intelligence scene is agentic AI, a shift SAS Institute Inc. saw coming.

The company calls the “decisioning space,” or software based on autonomous AI agents, its “bread and butter.” This week, SAS announced it was building on its Viya cloud-based and AI analytics platform with updates focused on improving AI governance and giving customers more control.

Alice McClure of SAS talks about the company’s foray into agentic AI.

“When we look at the macro audience of who we’re targeting here, it’s really the builders and buyers of AI ultimately,” said Alice McClure (pictured), senior director of product marketing at SAS. “The teams that [builders] work on need to be personally productive. The buyers need to be able to address very complicated business cases … and so it’s those two audiences that ultimately our agentic AI strategy is really all about and making sure that we’re serving them with the right tools and the right solutions.”

McClure spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Scott Hebner at SAS Innovate, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed SAS’ agentic AI platform and industry-specific agents. (* Disclosure below.)

Keeping humans in the loop of agentic AI systems

Many users are concerned about the autonomy and accuracy of agentic AI, according to McClure. SAS has attempted to alleviate those concerns with better governance and pre-packaged agents that can perform industry-specific tasks.

“The really core agent space around decisioning is the building, the deployment and the governance of agents,” she said. “You’re able to bring in business rules, you’re able to bring in the workflow, the path to decisioning … and be able to track the path of that decision and govern it along the way and have lineage all the way back again to where you started with the data.”

SAS also reinforces a “human-in-the-loop” strategy — one that doesn’t just insert oversight, but defines it. The critical distinction is understanding precisely what role the human plays in the decision chain: what requires human scrutiny, what can be safely delegated to agents and where accountability resides across that continuum. This clarity is essential to building trust in automated outcomes, according to McClure.

“I’m excited for the fear to get out of the system a bit more,” she said. “I’m excited to see customers winning with agent deployments. I’m excited for us to, for the market in general, to have a level of confidence and feel empowered around these kinds of decisions.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of SAS Innovate:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAS Innovate. Neither SAS Institute Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE