SAS infuses Viya with next-gen AI tools

SAS Viya, a comprehensive data and AI platform, is gaining new AI tools designed to enhance productivity and accelerate decision-making. SAS, an analytics and software company, is adding these features to equip users with new capabilities for data analysis, model development, and streamlined decision-making processes.

“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,” says Kathy Lange, IDC research director for AI Software. “SAS continues to develop offerings that streamline and automate the AI life cycle and enable organisations to make better business decisions faster.”

The upcoming SAS Viya features include:

• SAS Data Maker – Introduced through private preview last year, SAS’ secure synthetic data generator helps organisations tackle data privacy and scarcity challenges, while simplifying processes and conserving resources. Accelerated through SAS’ recent acquisition of synthetic data pioneer Hazy’s principal software assets, SAS Data Maker is expected for general availability in the third quarter of 2025.

• SAS Viya Intelligent Decisioning – Available now, SAS Viya Intelligent Decisioning facilitates building and deploying intelligent AI agents with “just the right” AI-autonomy-to-human-involvement ratio to strike the optimal oversight balance for task complexity, risk and business goals. 

• SAS Managed Cloud Services: SAS Viya Essentials – A packaged Managed Cloud Services offering of select SAS Viya products. Currently targeted to small and mid-size businesses, the offering reduces the barrier to entry, delivering SAS Viya in a small, out-of-the box hosted managed service.

• SAS Viya Copilot – Built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, SAS Viya Copilot is an AI-driven conversational assistant embedded directly into the SAS Viya platform that gives developers, data scientists and business users alike a powerful personal assistant that accelerates analytical, business and industry tasks. SAS Viya Copilot is currently available via an invitation-only, private preview, with the general availability release coming in the third quarter of 2025. Key features of the initial Copilot offering include AI-powered model development and code assistance for SAS users.

• SAS Viya Workbench – Released in 2024, SAS Viya Workbench is a cloud-based coding environment purpose-built for developers, data scientists, and modelers to significantly improve speed and efficiency and easily conduct data management, analysis, and model development using SAS or Python code, through Visual Studio Code or Jupyter Notebook. New in 2025 is the support of R coding, SAS Enterprise Guide as an optional integrated development environment (IDE) option, and the expansion from the initial availability on AWS Marketplace to include availability on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

SAS Viya is positioned as a comprehensive data and AI platform designed to provide practical analytics capabilities for users of varying skill levels. The platform offers users the option to build AI using end-to-end tools or to access pre-built AI solutions and model packages, both aimed at enhancing scalability and productivity to support decision-making and reduce time to value.

SAS Viya facilitates collaboration across developers, data scientists, IT professionals, and business analysts within a unified ecosystem, integrating the data and AI life cycle to support informed decision-making. The platform is intended to accelerate productivity across industries and regulatory environments, providing a strategic advantage for organisations, particularly CIOs and IT leaders.

In fact, a 2024 Futurum Group AI productivity study revealed that SAS Viya helps users accelerate the AI life cycle, enabling them to collect data, build models, and deploy decisions 4.6 times faster than selected competitors, while helping them increase innovation, expedite decision making and drive revenue growth.

Bryan Harris, CTO of SAS, says: “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.” 

Supporting global conservation with data and AI

The power of SAS Viya extends beyond improving business outcomes to boosting global conservation efforts. Fathom Science, a technology start-up building digital twins of the ocean, tapped SAS Viya to tackle an impractical problem that brought together the unlikely combination of ocean data, AI and a species in need of a lifeline. 

To validate its whale location prediction model that helps prevent vessels from striking critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, Fathom Science used SAS Data Maker to create synthetic data with the characteristics of the actual shipping lane data to expand to 500,000 data points. With the data in hand, SAS Viya Workbench was used to develop models to calculate the probability of whales’ distance from shore. Through this, Fathom Science gained statistical and machine learning validation of its whale location prediction model.