SAS at 50: From Analytics Pioneer to the Governance and Orchestration Layer of AI

Self-driving has been “almost here” for over a decade. But somewhere between DARPA challenges and a handful of driverless trucks hauling freight between Dallas and Houston, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson’s story changed. The self-driving truck company started commercial driverless operations last April and is now scaling from a handful of trucks to hundreds this year.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, we’re bringing you a […]

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.

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.

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.

Insider Brief PRESS RELEASE — Pudu Robotics, a global leader in commercial service robotics, officially opened a new U.S. headquarters in Dallas, Texas, on April 23 as part of its global strategic expansion. The new facility is set to enhance Pudu’s regional capabilities and underscores the company’s long-term commitment to the Americas, marking a new phase […]

You don’t lose sleep over dashboards. You lose sleep over decisions. You’re standing on the factory floor, surrounded by the hum of million-dollar assets, and you know something is off. An alert flashes on a screen: "Anomaly Detected." But what now? In that split second, the gap between a minor [...] The post Your factory floor is asking for better decisions. Are you listening? appeared first on SAS Blogs.

As we celebrate our 50th anniversary, this Earth Day carries special meaning for us at SAS. For me, it’s also a moment to step back and evaluate what has worked and what it really takes to sustain environmental progress over time. Reflecting on five decades of environmental stewardship, we didn’t [...] The post Reflecting on 50 years of environmental innovation appeared first on SAS Blogs.