SAS’s 2024 Innovate event saw SAS deliver a wide variety of solution sets around AI, many of which are available now, with a few coming later this year.
Reggie Townsend, Vice President, SAS Data Ethics Practice
LAS VEGAS – At their SAS Innovate 2024 event here, SAS continued the same emphasis on Thursday that it had stressed on Wednesday. That was the expansion of their AI capabilities, and rolling more out as new or highly enhanced solutions. Important announcements from Wednesday like the SAS version of CoPilot, SAS Data Maker and an expanded version of Viya were complemented by new model cards, and AI governance services.
“We want to provide AI to builders, to AI buyers of solutions and now, to consumers of models,” said SAS CTO Bryan Harris. “This represents an important step for SAS. In the past, leveragers of AI had to be creators. Now we are extending SAS models far beyond LLM, so customers can benefit from our 47 years of leadership. These new models give you more options to buy and integrate models throughout your entire business. Companies that can’t create value faster than cloud providers are becoming irrelevant,”
Harris stressed that this enhanced productivity, performance and trust.
“Now that productivity has been enhanced with the automation of the entire lifecycle, all programming languages can be leveraged, and improved performance means that we do all that faster,” Harris emphasized. This also provides improved trust. When we deliver, you become fearless. When you learn faster, you embrace the future.”
SAS’s flagship cloud analytics Viya solution is not new, but it received major upgrades at this event, including the general availability of SAS Viya Workbench. Targeted at developers and modelers, Viya Workbench is a self-service, on-demand compute environment for conducting data preparation, exploratory data analysis, and developing analytical and machine learning models. Viya Workbench allows developers and modelers to work in the language of their choice, which will initially be SAS and Python, with R available by the end of 2024. Viya Workbench also offers two development environment options – Jupyter Notebook/JupyterLab and Visual Studio Code.
“Our SAS Viya is the fastest and most accurate platform in the market,” Harris said. “Last year it was 30-50% faster than others in the market. Now this will be exponential for Python developers. We see this as part of a future with an explosion of applications.”
Jared Peterson. Senior Vice President of Engineering at SAS
“Workbench is us going straight after the development community,” stated Jared Peterson. Senior Vice President of Engineering at SAS. “It points to our future vision. We don’t have to build everything ourselves, because Workbench complements the rest of our ecosystem.”
Also new is SAS Viya Copilot. While numerous products have come out from different vendors this year with the Copilot branding, commencing with Microsoft, SAS is stressing that its Copilot is distinct, although at this point its first iteration of Viya Copilot is only available through an invitation-only private preview.
Copilot enhances productivity for developers, data scientists and business users with a personal assistant that accelerates analytical, business and industry tasks. Viya Copilot offers diverse tools for tasks like code generation, data cleaning, data exploration, marketing planning, journey design and knowledge gap analysis. It enhances productivity for developers, data scientists and business users with a personal assistant that accelerates analytical, business and industry tasks. Viya Copilot offers diverse tools for tasks like code generation, data cleaning, data exploration, marketing planning, journey design and knowledge gap analysis.
“These additional tasks made possible by the tools is something that is unique to SAS,” Harris said. “You won’t find these in the other personal assistants.”
Marinela Profi, Global AI Strategy Lead at SAS
“SAS Viya Copilot will allow users to see data sets available,” said Marinela Profi, Global AI Strategy Lead at SAS. “You don’t need to start from scratch any more. It’s all just a matter of the creativity of the developer. Everyone will be able to build their own Copilot. But that’s possible only if all of your data runs only in your own servers.”
Another new solution is SAS Data Maker, which addresses data privacy and scarcity challenges by generating high-quality synthetic tabular data without compromising sensitive information, enabling organizations to address data privacy. SAS Data Maker is now available in private preview.
“SAS Data Maker is our first SaaS solution service,” Profi stated. “We always go back to data because there is no good AI without good data. Synthetic data makes it available in as easy a way as possible. It generates low code high quality data with complete transparency, which will eliminate the need for manual data collection and third party data providers.”
“We can build tabular structured data to address models customers want to build with this,” Harris added.
Finally, model cards and new AI Governance Advisory services have been introduced to help organizations navigate the turbulent AI landscape, mitigating risk and helping them pursue AI goals more confidently. SAS has also published a Trustworthy AI Life Cycle Workflow, mapped to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework.
The models are basically ‘nutrition labels’ that encourage transparency and point out potential bias and model drift, while supporting open source models. The SAS approach is to autogenerate model cards for registered models with content directly from SAS products, removing the burden from individual users to create them.
“We think model cards have to be easy, not just for use by technologists,” said Reggie Townsend, Vice President, SAS Data Ethics Practice. “Our cards have indicators for accuracy, fairness and model drift.”
Townsend, who pointed out an obvious thing he learned in his sales background, that it’s a lot easier to sell to people who trust you, emphasized how SAS has built trust in throughout the system.
“Synthetic data has a significant impact on trustworthiness,” he said. “The most common concern now is deep fakes, but you can label synthetic data without concerns about violating trust.”
To help customers on their data and AI journeys, SAS is launching AI Governance Advisory, a value-added service for current customers. Beginning with a short meeting, SAS AI Governance Advisory will help customers think through what AI governance means in the context of their organizations. SAS has piloted this service, and customers have noted several benefits: Increased productivity from trusted and distributed decision making; Improved trust from better accountability in data usage; The ability to win and keep top talent who demand responsible innovation practices; Increased competitive advantage and market agility from being “forward compliant,”
“The idea is to transform the technological landscape,’ Townsend said. “Corny is inauthentic and does not build trust. This helps customers think what AI Goverannce means within the context of their organization.”
