SAS Innovate 2025 brought a number of new updates from SAS, including the company unveiling SAS Intelligent Decisioning for agentic AI.
A human approach to AI intelligence
Available on the SAS Viya data and AI platform, this new solution empowers organizations to design, deploy, and scale AI agents with balanced human and AI autonomy, embedded governance, and explainability of decisions.
“Agentic AI represents a tremendously exciting opportunity for both individuals and organizations to leverage AI as a force multiplier because, for the first time, we have AI that doesn’t just make a prediction, detection, or classification, but can also act and make decisions for us,” said Marinela Profi, Global AI Market Strategy Lead at SAS, during the SAS Innovate 2025 conference. “At SAS, we see the future of AI agents that are relevant first, and then make context-aware and context-driven decisions at scale with trust.”
Three pillars are key to SAS Viya’s agentic AI framework to define how AI agents are designed and delivered. They are:
- Decisioning: Through a hybrid approach, combining deterministic analytics with the flexibility and reasoning of large language models (LLMs), to enable customers to build AI agents that deliver precise and reliable outcomes, with necessary business guardrails and rules required in regulated industries.
- Human and AI balance: SAS enables organizations to determine the appropriate level of AI autonomy and human involvement for AI agents based on task complexity, risk, and business goals. AI agents can operate autonomously in routine, data-driven tasks while humans provide the oversight, ethical judgment, and strategic direction.
- Governance: SAS’ built-in governance framework enables customers to build AI agents that deliver accurate outcomes, adhere to ethical standards, maintain data privacy, align with business values, and withstand regulatory scrutiny.
SAS roadmap emphasizes efficiency gains through productivity solutions
“We know that the future of AI development and the future of business tasks execution is AI assisted and so we are infusing productivity assistance as part of both our platform and solutions with SAS Viya Copilot,” said Profi. “Think of it as a productivity assistant that allows our users to work smarter and faster with building enterprise logic in a secure way. Viya Copilot is available in a private preview and we are very excited to announce it in [general availability] in Q3, and it’s a wonderful collaboration with our partner, Microsoft.”
The organization says that SAS Viya supports organizations through every stage of the agentic AI journey. From data ingestion and analysis to building, deploying, and monitoring AI agents, the solutions enable continuous performance tracking, governance, and security.
Further, SAS’ future agentic AI roadmap includes infusing co-pilot productivity assistants into SAS Viya to assist users with faster and smarter work while reducing manual steps. SAS also intends to deliver pre-packaged, domain-specific intelligent agents that can integrate seamlessly into industry workflows, accelerating time-to-value without sacrificing control or confidence for organizations.
SAS made a number of announcements during their annual conference, and is committed to being an elite channel partner. Read more about their push to drive partner success in a conversation with John Carey, SAS VP of Global Channels.