SAS Innovate 2026 has kicked off in Grapevine, Texas, and the data and AI organization has made several key announcements to coincide with the large-scale event.
SAS is now focused on the transition from experimentation to enterprise-scale AI, as AI is increasingly embedded in business processes and no longer operates solely as a tool.
The organization is placing an emphasis on governed, industry-specific, and operational AI.
AI Navigator: Bringing order to AI complexity
In an effort to bring order to AI chaos, which has left organizations struggling to track AI use, SAS is introducing AI Navigator.
The SAS AI Navigator is a SaaS solution that helps AI, data, compliance, and risk leaders compile a complete AI inventory and align AI use cases with government regulations and internal policies.
“The biggest risk to any AI governance program isn’t regulation; it’s a tool so complex that no one uses it,” said Reggie Townsend, Vice President, Data Ethics Practice, SAS. “SAS AI Navigator was designed to make the path to responsible AI irresistible.”
Q3 Azure Marketplace availability and more information on use cases
AI Navigator will be available in Q3 2026 on Microsoft Azure Marketplace and will enable organizations to inventory and govern AI use cases. Further, the governance extends to models and agents that power use cases and policies that apply to them.
The offering provides a unified view of the models and tools organizations already use, including LLMs, AI agents, and open-source or SAS models – rather than changing how they build AI.
Making the path to responsible AI irresistible was just the starting point for SAS, as Townsend puts it.
“What we did was we came up with this idea of SAS AI Navigator. It’s a centralized way of getting visibility to AI inventory,” said Townsend. “We can actually help leaders think about how their AI is being used, where it’s been used, and for what purpose. AI governance is not just a technical exercise, it’s really highly intellectual. And so when you look across industries writ large, the pattern is consistent in terms of the use cases, but the way those use cases show up is different.”
AI Navigator helps organizations address a common issue: fragmented AI strategies and a lack of clarity. It acts as a control tower for enterprise AI.
SAS Viya Enhancements: From Copilots to Autonomous Systems
New SAS Viya enhancements were announced as well, with the expansion including governed AI assistants and agentic AI capabilities.
These new updates build on SAS Viya’s existing AI foundation. Among the new features are:
- SAS Viya Copilot: A family of AI assistants embedded across the analytics life cycle.
- SAS Viya Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server: This update utilizes the open MCP standard to expose SAS Viya analytics and decisioning capabilities as tools for AI agents.
- SAS Agentic AI Accelerator: A curated framework for building, governing, and deploying AI agents within SAS Viya.
“The role of human expertise in operationalizing agentic AI is not diminished by automation; it’s elevated,” said Jared Peterson, Senior Vice President, Global Engineering at SAS. “With SAS Viya, organizations can pair copilots and agents with human judgment, trusted data, and enterprise governance, so AI doesn’t just generate outputs, but drives responsible, real-world decisions.”
SAS Viya Copilot brings an AI assistant into analytics workflows
SAS Viya Copilot is a governed, conversational AI assistant that is embedded directly into the SAS Viya platform.
It’s designed to work with human experts inside production-grade analytics workflows. Further, it integrates into Microsoft Foundry to operate inside analytics workflows rather than as a standalone chat interface.
The Copilot and AI capabilities will eventually extend across data management, model management, and AI infrastructure to enable consistent AI assistance from data ingestion to deployment.
MCP Server embeds SAS intelligence into enterprise AI agents
The SAS Viya MCP Server, meanwhile, enables organizations to embed SAS’s analytics, governance, and domain intelligence into their own agents from the LLM interface of their choice without duplicating logic or bypassing enterprise controls.
“With MCP, users can now define tools for each of the tasks across the analytical lifecycle,” said Marinela Profi, Global Marketing Strategy Lead for Agentic AI, SAS.
“So, that Copilot is not only answering questions for you, but you can invoke capabilities across Viya. We wanted those to not just be tools for our Copilot, but as tools for any agent. And so that is exactly what we are doing with SAS Viya MCP Server.”
SAS Agentic AI Accelerator enables teams at any skill level to design and operationalize AI agents with governance and trust.
It provides a collection of code, components, interfaces, and best practices to help teams build, govern, and deploy AI agents within SAS Viya.