SAS looks to go next level with industry-specific AI

That’s where SAS Institute Inc. and its deal with industry-specific AI comes into play, in accordance with Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst of Constellation Research Inc., who spoke with theCUBE through the SAS Innovate event. What the corporate has been showing is where models come into play and what one can do with the info.

“These guys are steeped on this. We’re talking like many years of experience. What they’re attempting to do here is package it, so it’s going to be easy for purchasers to make use of,” Wang said. “It’s been certainly one of the things that has been burning SAS for a very long time. They’ve been seen because the legacy analytics company. They’re slow to make a move. But what? It’s of their profit straight away.”

The central message of the recent SAS Innovate event was that SAS, with all of its knowledge, is attempting to make it easier for people to make use of AI. For SAS, it means establishing a deal with industry-specific AI while outlining the essential products and processes along the best way.

This feature is an element of theCUBE’s special coverage as a part of SAS Innovate. (* Disclosure below.)

Advancements in SAS Viya and AI integration

Key to understanding SAS’ strategy means understanding updates to the corporate’s Viya artificial intelligence and analytics platform. In September 2023, the corporate amped up development features in Viya and said users of its customer relationship management application Customer Intelligence 360 would find a way to integrate with their alternative of generative AI models to be used in marketing planning, content creation and journey design.

SAS further outlined its plans for SAS Viya in April 2024. At the moment, the corporate announced latest industry-specific generative AI assistants, a brand new developer platform called SAS Viya Workbench, and a brand new synthetic data generator called SAS Data Maker. The corporate introduced a brand new Viya Copilot offering for developers, data scientists and business users, which the corporate said would help with every little thing from administrative analytics tasks to solving industry-specific business problems.

SAS said that Viya Copilot could help simplify code compilation, speed up the code commenting process and create streamlined code interpretation. Andy Thurai, vp and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said on the time of the announcement that Copilot could help users manage multiple tasks and be particularly useful for knowledge gap evaluation and data wrangling tasks.

“This might be useful in reducing the necessity to perform manual tasks where data scientists spend much of their time,” he said.

At SAS Innovate 2024, the corporate also provided more information when it got here to its SAS Data Maker, which it describes as a trusted synthetic data generation experience. SAS Data Maker allows the corporate to attack the gap in structured data for synthetic data, in accordance with Bryan Harris, chief technology officer of SAS.

“By having the ability to try this, we are able to go into regulated spaces and provides proof to the statistical congruence of synthetic data that may bootstrap models that can allow them to run effectively on real-world data,” Harris told theCUBE.

Over the following 12 months, solutions are anticipated to be built with SAS App Factory, a rapid application development environment for creating AI-driven applications. The productivity of that product is notable, in accordance with Harris.

“We began wrapping some generative AI experiences on constructing applications … the treatment on that’s going to be incredible,” he said. “I believe what you’re going to see on our Viya Copilot … the power for our Viya Copilot to be a really practical approach to the AI lifecycle, I believe it’s going to be world-class and second to none.”

SAS’s go-to-market strategy amid a changing landscape

For corporations which are considering potential IPOs while integrating AI, there’s clearly much to contemplate on this latest environment. To get from point A to point B, one must consider one’s AI story, in accordance with Wang. For SAS, the corporate must show subscription revenue growth as they’ve been going from on-prem to cloud, in accordance with Wang. That’s certainly one of the corporate’s big challenges.

“They’ve actually been showing growth with Viya,” he said. “The third thing really is that they have to indicate that they’ve got a management team that goes beyond [Jim Goodnight, cofounder and chief executive officer of SAS]. They’ve been doing that. They’ve removed and replaced loads of people along the best way.”

In terms of the go-to-market for SAS, it involves a deal with partnerships and ecosystem, in accordance with theCUBE Research’s Principal Analyst Rob Strechay. That’s an important a part of the months ahead.

“They actually need to leap in, full-on, with that, because I believe a part of that can help them in that runway to get to repeatability, that ARR, and provides them that runway that gets them the eight-plus quarters of successive growth,” Strechay said.

This conversation is growing in importance given the landscape in Silicon Valley today, with a series of layoffs being amongst the massive stories of the 12 months. For SAS, responding means an emphasis on getting AI into the hands of the people.

“AI really gives them an actual accelerated tailwind to modernize and get a brand new opportunity to reshape their brand,” said John Furrier, executive analyst with theCUBE Research. “Because, look. Let’s face it. You don’t need to be your grandfather’s tool from the 90s, or 80s, and even 40 years ago. But they’ve all the info.”

Industry-specific AI a key plank in SAS’ future

As SAS Innovate 2024 drew to a detailed, the corporate’s vision for industry-specific AI integration became more clear. SAS Viya is the centerpiece for the corporate’s long-term AI strategy, while SAS is in search of to leverage its nearly 50 years of experience to simplify AI applications.

In some unspecified time in the future, corporations have to integrate all technology, in accordance with Harris. What one is absolutely attending to is making a final decision to offer a response back to a user.

“As we all know, loads of these use cases straight away are very shallow. They’re just prompt engineering to an LLM and are available back,” Harris said. “Yes, RAG architectures are there, but we’ve got to get things done in sub-second response times here. There’s very, very difficult integration and expectations of responses from generative AI workflows that we’ve got to get done.”

That’s where Viya comes into play. The goal is to bring all the aforementioned details together, Harris added.

“We will augment prompts, we are able to orchestrate against other traditional models and things like that and convey that data back in in order that the LLM can reason over that and send back the response back to the user,” Harris said.

All told, SAS has outlined its goal for industry-specific AI integration and its advanced AI models. Eventually, the corporate will sell “Lego blocks of models” to be applied across different scenarios and industries, in accordance with Furrier.

“We’ve been seeing on theCUBE that the info science world is shrinking … when it comes to core people,” Furrier said. “You don’t need to be a knowledge scientist, you don’t need to be in the sport with generative AI. You possibly can be a user. And the democratization wave that’s coming in … could be very clear in the info.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAS Innovate. No sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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