SAS and IDC reveal AI readiness report for small and midsize businesses

Small and medium-sized businesses recognize the transformative nature of AI, with two-thirds of respondents in a recent ASUS survey agreeing AI is creating a significant evolution in business practices, and some even calling it “generational.” The question, then, is how best to realize AI’s potential. For SMBs, following a simple, three-pronged strategy is a good way to get started on your AI journey, says Shawn Chang, General Manager, System Business Group, ASUS North America. Step 1: Conduct an IT tool audit Chances are, your employees are already using myriad AI tools, whether IT knows it or not. A survey by Business.com found 84% of SMB employees use chatbots, 67% use AI-powered search, and 41% use image generators, for example.[1] Likewise, 60% of respondents to the ASUS survey already use AI tools for virtual meetings, including automated transcripts, real-time translations, and AI-driven noise cancellation. The key is to ensure employees use trusted applications and that multipl

There’s a question floating around in many conversations, leadership meetings, hiring decisions, at home and in the way companies are quietly restructuring. Most people aren’t saying it directly, but it’s there. SAS CTO Bryan Harris did say it directly, which set the stage for this genuinely thought-provoking moment. “Will people [...] The post Human ingenuity is still the engine behind AI appeared first on SAS Blogs.

At its annual SAS Innovate conference in Dallas this week, SAS is celebrating its 50th anniversary by making a case for its relevance in this very different era of computing. […] The post SAS at 50: From Analytics Pioneer to the Governance and Orchestration Layer of AI appeared first on AIwire.

Every lottery ticket printed is a forecast – and when that forecast is wrong, the consequences are immediate. “If the ticket’s there, you buy it. If the display is empty, you walk away,” said Kyle Gray, Insights and Analytics Manager at the North Carolina Education Lottery. “That moment is forecasting.” [...] The post Forecasting accuracy improves 5.9% at North Carolina Education Lottery appeared first on SAS Blogs.

Getting stalled enterprise AI rollouts in the EMEA region moving again will require CIOs to aggressively audit their systems. Over the past 18 months, AI deployments across Europe advanced far beyond initial testing. Companies poured capital into large language models and machine learning, expecting heavy operational upgrades. IDC research reveals that boards are slowing down, […] The post IDC: How EMEA CIOs can jumpstart AI rollouts appeared first on AI News.

Enterprises are quickly moving from AI experimentation to deployment, however, when agentic AI begins making more decisions, invoking more tools, and operating across fragmented data environments, there can be an erosion of visibility, governance, and trust. SAS laid out its answer to that problem at its annual conference, SAS Innovate, introducing a new family of copilots, agent frameworks, Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugins, and management tools to help enterprises operationalize AI without losing control of it. “What we’re seeing here is really a shift from AI that forms to AI that acts,” Marinela Profi, the company’s global AI and generative AI market strategy lead, said at the event. “This is a significant leap, because it introduces new requirements around trust, around governance, around accountability.” Interacting with agents more intuitively To begin with, SAS today announced SAS Viya Copilot, a human-governed, conversational AI assistant embedded into its Viya platform. It

If you scroll through job postings right now, you’ll see a pattern. Plenty of roles asking people to train models, fine-tune outputs, build agents and automate workflows. Fewer ones are asking for the kind of judgment that used to sit at the center of how decisions get made. At the [...] The post SAS Innovate 2026: Will people matter as AI scales? appeared first on SAS Blogs.

SAS leaders tipped their hats to the latest advances in data and AI and to the road ahead, at the media briefing during SAS Innovate. Leaders shared updates across agentic AI, industry-ready models, data management, governance and emerging technology, all grounded in helping organizations put AI to work responsibly and [...] The post Even the news is bigger in Texas: Highlights from the SAS Innovate media briefing appeared first on SAS Blogs.