SAS Reveals AI Agents With Customizable Human-AI Interaction

SAS launches Intelligent Decisioning for agentic AI on Viya, blending autonomy, governance, and productivity with Microsoft Copilot integration.

Written By: Jordan Smith
May 13, 2025
Channel Insider content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

thumbnail Jordan Smith

Jordan Smith is a news writer who has seven years of experience as a journalist, copywriter, podcaster, and copyeditor. He has worked with both written and audio media formats, contributing to IT publications such as MeriTalk, HCLTech, and Channel Insider, and participating in podcasts and panel moderation for IT events.

Recommended for you...

MetTel to Modernize Communication Lines for VA

MetTel secures a $54M contract to modernize 15,000 VA phone lines across 1,875 locations using its POTS Transformation solution, enhancing reliability and performance.

Jordan Smith
Aug 8, 2025
Stibo Systems Launches New AI Capabilities Across Portfolio

Stibo Systems unveils AI-driven MDM tools to reduce manual work, boost data accuracy, and accelerate operations for global enterprises and partners.

Jordan Smith
Aug 7, 2025
Galactic Advisors Wins Credential-Free Assessment Patent

Galactic Advisors patents a user-activated, credential-free pen testing tool, boosting MSP security with risk-free, forensic-grade assessments.

Jordan Smith
Aug 6, 2025
Shadow AI Meets Its Match in SentinelOne’s Latest Move

SentinelOne acquires Prompt Security to secure GenAI use, adding real-time visibility, control, and protection across AI tools and enterprise systems.

Channel Insider Logo

Channel Insider combines news and technology recommendations to keep channel partners, value-added resellers, IT solution providers, MSPs, and SaaS providers informed on the changing IT landscape. These resources provide product comparisons, in-depth analysis of vendors, and interviews with subject matter experts to provide vendors with critical information for their operations.

Property of TechnologyAdvice. © 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.