SAS Viya expands AI tools with new offerings & cloud services

SAS has unveiled several new offerings on its SAS Viya platform aimed at supporting greater speed, productivity, and trust in AI deployment and analytics.

The latest additions to SAS Viya include the forthcoming SAS Data Maker, a synthetic data generator intended to tackle data privacy and scarcity issues within organisations. According to SAS, this solution builds on technology acquired from Hazy's principal software assets and is expected to be generally available in the third quarter of 2025.

Currently available is SAS Viya Intelligent Decisioning, which allows users to construct and deploy intelligent AI agents designed to provide an appropriate balance between machine autonomy and human oversight, taking into account task complexity, risk profiles, and business objectives.

SAS has also launched SAS Managed Cloud Services: SAS Viya Essentials, a managed service package primarily aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. The company says that Viya Essentials delivers the SAS Viya experience in a compact, hosted and managed service arrangement to help reduce barriers to entry for organisations seeking to implement analytics capabilities.

SAS Viya Copilot, an AI-powered conversational assistant, is currently in private preview with general availability expected in the third quarter of 2025. According to SAS, the Copilot will provide assistance to developers, data scientists, and business users, enabling AI-powered model development and code support. It is built on Azure AI Services and is described as a significant outcome of the SAS and Microsoft partnership.

Another recent release is SAS Viya Workbench, which offers a cloud environment for coding aimed at enhancing the speed and efficiency of developers, data scientists, and modelers. Workbench facilitates data management, analysis, and model development using SAS or Python code and integrates with Visual Studio Code or Jupyter Notebook. For 2025, Workbench adds support for R coding, SAS Enterprise Guide as an IDE option, and is expanding its availability from AWS Marketplace to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Kathy Lange, Research Director for AI Software at IDC, commented on the company's direction: "SAS is evolving its strategy and portfolio to embrace a broader ecosystem of user personas, preferences, and technologies within an enterprise's AI technology stack. SAS continues to develop offerings that streamline and automate the AI life cycle and enable organisations to make better business decisions faster."

SAS highlighted a recent AI productivity study conducted by the Futurum Group in 2024, which reported that SAS Viya users were able to accelerate their AI life cycle by collecting data, building models, and deploying decisions 4.6 times faster than selected competitors. The study also found increased innovation, faster decision making, and revenue growth for users.

Bryan Harris, Chief Technology Officer at SAS, addressed the pace of change in the AI sector by saying, "The current economic climate and rapid pace of AI innovation can feel intense and overwhelming. Our goal is to deliver cutting-edge AI capabilities that help organisations navigate the hype and disruption, make breakthroughs in problem solving, and gain a decision advantage."

SAS also pointed to the role its technology is playing beyond commercial applications. Fathom Science, a start-up focused on creating digital twins of the ocean, used SAS Viya to address marine conservation concerns. By employing SAS Data Maker, Fathom Science generated synthetic shipping lane data to aid in the validation of its whale location prediction model, which is designed to reduce the risk of vessels striking critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. The process involved expanding available data points and utilising SAS Viya Workbench to develop machine learning models for estimating whale proximity to shore, leading to statistical and machine learning validation of their approach.