The decision intelligence field is growing, spurred by artificial intelligence development, and SAS Institute is poised to play.

At SAS Innovate 2025, the analytics giant announced quantum and agentic AI solutions, highlighted strategic alliances with Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., and clarified its vision for efficient and securely governed AI. As the industry shifts from exploring generative AI to implementing it, SAS is focused on driving intelligent decision-making.

TheCUBE on set at SAS Innovate 2025.

“Just like the browser became just a gateway into the world of the internet and people built around it to get the value out of it, gen AI is kind of the same,” said Scott Hebner (pictured, right), principal analyst for AI at theCUBE Research. “But it doesn’t really allow you to make decisions. Agents are going to help you make decisions. The digital twins are going to help you simulate what-if scenarios. Then quantum’s going to deal with your compute resources and your ability to get things quicker, at lower cost.”

Hebner and Paul Gillin (middle), enterprise editor at SiliconANGLE, spoke with theCUBE host, Rebecca Knight (left), in a keynote analysis at SAS Innovate 2025, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed SAS’ foray into quantum AI and decision intelligence, and its response to the call for better governance. During the event, they also talked with industry experts about innovations in the AI ecosystem, as well as evolving digital transformation. (*Disclosure below.)

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Rebecca Knight, Paul Gillin and Scott Hebner:

Here are three key insights you may have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of the event:

1. SAS is redefining AI architecture, with an emphasis on quantum.

Now that generative AI is old news, SAS is taking a different view of AI architecture. During the event, the company showed attendees a hybrid AI model that combined quantum and traditional methods in order to significantly reduce computation without sacrificing data quality.

“[SAS] has really pivoted to a futuristic vision of AI,” Gillin said. “They’re focusing on stuff like quantum AI. They have a knack for looking out, looking around corners, looking over the edge and continuing to be relevant in a market that moves at light speed.”

SAS’ John Carey and Intel’s Muge Tanik talk with theCUBE about prioritizing optimized intelligence.

SAS has also leaned into optimized intelligence alongside Intel. Moving on from graphics processing unit-first thinking, this partnership combines Intel’s latest hardware with SAS’ cloud infrastructure. The two teams stay in constant communication, with Intel’s engineers shaping chip design according to the needs of the SAS Research and Development team, according to John Carey, vice president of global channels at SAS, and Muge Tanik, GM, AI solutions and partnerships, at Intel.

“When these guys send over hardware to our R&D, it’s like Christmas morning,” Carey said. “These are the gifts that keep on giving because they allow our team to get really excited about the new parameters that they can open up, the new acceleration, how they can solve those problems and take full advantage of all of the new innovation that Intel is doing on the chip set.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with John Carey and Muge Tanik:

2. Decision intelligence is the future of enterprise.

In addition to Intel, SAS has also found a valuable partner in Microsoft. Its Viya capabilities have now been integrated into Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end intelligent data platform. Together, the companies aim to create scalable AI solutions, with Microsoft serving up the infrastructure and SAS providing the decision intelligence on top, according to Jared Peterson, senior vice president of research and development at SAS, and Eduardo Joia, chief technology officer and managing director for financial services industry at Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Eduardo Joia and SAS’ Jared Peterson talk with theCUBE about their partnership.

“Intelligent decisioning and now Decision Builder in Fabric is really all about that last mile of AI and analytics,” Peterson said. “That last mile is where you get into some of the tricky parts of getting to real business value with AI and analytics.”

Microsoft Fabric’s abstraction layer makes it easier for users to train AI models on different types or styles of data. SAS complements Fabric with decision intelligence technologies, based on agentic or quantum AI, that move models from training to action, according to Peterson.  

“We got a lot of fancy demos, but we’re struggling to translate those into actual value in our business,” he said during the event. “That’s where I think when Viya comes to the table; we’re bringing all these years of expertise.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Eduardo Joia and Jared Peterson:

3. SAS embraces agentic AI, with safeguards.

While certain quantum solutions might seem far off, agentic AI is of the moment, and SAS has shown itself to be ahead of the curve on the industry shift from gen AI chatbots to autonomous agents, Alice McClure, senior director of product marketing at SAS. During the event, the company announced updates to its Viya platform that focus on industry-specific agents and better governance.

SAS’ Alice McClure talks with theCUBE about the company’s approach to agentic AI.

“The really core agent space around decisioning is the building, the deployment and the governance of agents,” McClure 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.”

As AI gets more responsibility in the form of agents, however, companies have grown concerned about security, governance and reliability. To address this issue, SAS supports a human-in-the-loop strategy and has released a series of pre-packaged agents that can perform industry-specific tasks for better accuracy. McClure emphasizes that part of AI adoption is being clear on the role of the agent and the role of the human. This differentiation was a theme that permeated the rest of the event.

“In the end, agents are only going to be as good as people trust them,” Hebner said. “If they’re supposed to be digital coworkers and you’re going to be partnering to make decisions … people have to trust it.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Alice McClure:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of SAS Innovate 2025, here’s our complete event video playlist:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE