SAS Strengthens Viya Platform with Advanced AI Assistants and Agentic AI Features

Dubai, UAE – SAS, a prominent player in the data and AI sector, has unveiled significant enhancements to its SAS® Viya® platform. These updates focus on advancing agentic AI capabilities, introducing a suite of new AI assistants, infrastructure for agents, and tools designed to accelerate AI deployment. This initiative aims to transition organizations from isolated generative AI applications to a more integrated, governed, and scalable intelligence framework.

New Features in SAS Viya

The latest enhancements to SAS Viya include:

• SAS Viya Copilot: A series of AI assistants integrated throughout the analytics lifecycle.
• SAS Viya Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server: Utilizing the open MCP standard to provide SAS Viya’s analytics and decision-making capabilities as resources for AI agents.
• SAS Agentic AI Accelerator: A structured framework for creating, governing, and deploying AI agents within the SAS Viya environment.

SAS leadership has underscored the critical role of human judgment in the responsible scaling of agentic AI technologies. Jared Peterson, Senior Vice President of Global Engineering at SAS, stated that the automation of processes does not diminish the need for human expertise; rather, it enhances it. He emphasized that SAS Viya allows organizations to combine AI capabilities with human insight, reliable data, and enterprise governance, ensuring that AI not only produces outputs but also informs responsible decision-making.

Embedded Copilot for Enhanced Analytics

The SAS Viya Copilot serves as a governed, conversational AI assistant embedded directly within the SAS Viya platform. It is designed to collaborate with human experts in production-grade analytics workflows, facilitating data analysis, model building, and decision-making while ensuring enterprise-level security and oversight.

This copilot integrates Microsoft Foundry, allowing it to function within analytics workflows instead of as a separate chat interface. It aids data scientists, developers, and business analysts in generating, explaining, and acting on insights through natural language across both coding environments and interactive visual interfaces.

Current capabilities of the SAS Viya Copilot include:

• General Q&A across core Viya applications, covering data discovery, model pipeline development, model management, decision intelligence, and environment management.
• Code acceleration featuring AI-generated SAS and Python code, along with documentation and explanations.
• Model pipeline guidance that provides intelligent recommendations, next steps, and explainability.
• Conversational dashboarding with AI-driven data enrichment, natural language dashboard creation, and automated insights.
• Visual investigation through AI-assisted search and AI-powered case narratives.

Over time, the capabilities of the SAS Viya Copilot will expand to encompass data management, model management, and AI infrastructure, ensuring consistent AI assistance from data ingestion to deployment. Unlike many generic AI assistants, the SAS Viya Copilot is tailored to execute domain-specific analytics tasks, leveraging industry data models and best practices.

Industry-Specific Copilot Capabilities

Currently available industry-specific capabilities include:

• SAS Asset and Liability Management (ALM) Copilot: This tool guides analysts through scenario configuration, execution, and interpretation for financial risk workflows, translating natural language inputs into governed analytic models.
• SAS Health Clinical Data Discovery Copilot: This copilot accelerates clinical data discovery and analysis, assisting users in data exploration, cohort creation, and quality investigation through natural language.

Plans are in place to expand the Viya Copilot to additional industries by 2026, including financial crime prevention in banking and intelligent planning and supply chain optimization for manufacturing.

Transitioning from Copilots to Agents

While the SAS Viya Copilot enhances user interaction with analytics, the introduction of agents allows for the integration of insights, decisions, and actions across systems at scale. Beyond the embedded AI assistants, SAS Viya offers the necessary infrastructure and tools for organizations to build, connect, and govern AI agents effectively. These capabilities, available to current Viya users via GitHub, are intended to transform isolated generative AI use cases into enterprise-ready agentic AI that operates seamlessly across systems, teams, and business processes.

The SAS Viya Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server standardizes the exposure of SAS analytics, models, and decision-making capabilities to external AI agents. By utilizing the SAS Viya MCP, organizations can incorporate SAS’s trusted analytics and governance into their own agents, maintaining enterprise controls without duplicating logic.

The SAS Agentic AI Accelerator empowers teams of varying skill levels—ranging from no-code to low-code and developers—to design and operationalize AI agents with governance and trust. This accelerator provides a curated collection of code, components, interfaces, and best practices, facilitating the transition from experimentation to production in a structured manner.

The SAS Retrieval Agent Manager (RAM) is a no-code solution based on the retrieval augmented generation framework. It simplifies the transformation of raw unstructured data into context-aware AI responses. While currently available as a standalone product, SAS plans to integrate RAM capabilities into SAS Viya, further enabling agents and assistants to provide accurate, trusted decision-making grounded in enterprise context.

These updates collectively position SAS Viya as a governed, enterprise-ready platform for agentic AI, supporting AI assistants and intelligent agents that work in concert to enhance value and convert trusted insights into actionable decisions at scale.

Today’s announcement was made at SAS Innovate, the company’s global data and AI conference, marking 50 years of innovation. The event is supported by partner sponsors, including Microsoft, Intel, and AWS.

About SAS
SAS is a global leader in data and AI. Through its software and industry-specific solutions, organizations can transform data into trusted decisions. SAS provides organizations with the power to know.

Source: www.zawya.com

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Published on 2026-05-18 13:31:00 • By the Editorial Desk