SAS expands SAS Viya with governed AI assistants and agentic AI capabilities

Rashad Iskandrni

New AI assistants and agent infrastructure help business and analytics teams move from experimentation to governed, production-ready intelligence

Dubai, UAE (May 18, 2026) – SAS, a global leader in data and AI, today announced expansions to SAS^® Viya^® that advance the platform’s agentic AI features, introducing new AI assistants, agent infrastructure and acceleration tools. Together, these updates build on SAS Viya’s existing AI foundation, helping organizations move from isolated generative AI use cases to governed, production-ready intelligence at scale.

New SAS Viya features include:

·        SAS Viya Copilot, a family of AI assistants embedded across the analytics life cycle.

·        SAS Viya Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, using the open MCP standard to expose SAS Viya analytics and decisioning capabilities as tools for AI agents.

·        SAS Agentic AI Accelerator, a curated framework for building, governing and deploying AI agents within SAS Viya.

SAS leadership emphasized the importance of human judgment in scaling agentic AI responsibly.

“The role of human expertise in operationalizing agentic AI is not diminished by automation; it's elevated,” said Jared Peterson, Senior Vice President, Global Engineering at SAS. “With SAS Viya, organizations can pair copilots and agents with human judgment, trusted data and enterprise governance, so AI doesn't just generate outputs but drives responsible, real-world decisions.”

Embedded – not bolted on – Copilot for data and AI tasks

SAS Viya Copilot is a governed, conversational AI assistant embedded directly into the SAS Viya platform, designed to work alongside human experts inside production-grade analytics workflows. It helps organizations analyze data, build models and make decisions across the analytic life cycle while maintaining enterprise-grade security and oversight.

SAS Viya Copilot integrates Microsoft Foundry to operate inside analytics workflows rather than as a standalone chat interface. It helps data scientists, developers and business analysts generate, explain and act on insights using natural language across both coding environments and interactive visual interfaces.

Current SAS Viya Copilot capabilities include:

·        General Q&A across core Viya applications, including data discovery, model pipeline development, model management, decision intelligence, and environment management.

·        Code acceleration with AI-generated SAS and Python code, documentation and explanations.

·        Model pipeline guidance with intelligent recommendations, next steps and explainability.

·        Conversational dashboarding with AI-driven data enrichment, natural language dashboard creation and automated insights.

·        Visual investigation with AI-assisted search and AI-powered case and alert narratives.

Over time, SAS Viya Copilot data and AI capabilities will extend across data management, model management and AI infrastructure, enabling consistent AI assistance from data ingestion to deployment.

Unlike many horizontal AI assistants that rely primarily on pretrained LLM knowledge or generic tools, SAS Viya Copilot is designed to execute domain-aware analytics tasks grounded in industry data models, terminology and best practices.

Industry Copilot capabilities available today include:

·        SAS Asset and Liability Management (ALM) Copilot, which guides analysts through scenario configuration, execution and interpretation for financial risk workflows, translating natural-language inputs into governed analytic models.

·        SAS Health Clinical Data Discovery Copilot, which accelerates clinical data discovery and analysis by guiding users through data exploration, cohort creation and quality investigation using natural language.

SAS plans to expand Viya Copilot for additional industries in 2026, including financial crime prevention in banking, and intelligent planning and supply chain optimization for manufacturing.

From copilots to agents across the SAS Viya platform

While SAS Viya Copilot improves how people interact with analytics, agents allow those capabilities to compound by connecting insights, decisions and actions across systems at scale.

Beyond embedded AI assistants, SAS Viya provides the infrastructure and tools organizations need to build, connect and govern AI agents at scale. These capabilities – available to current Viya users through GitHub – are designed to help transform isolated GenAI use cases into enterprise-ready agentic AI that works across systems, teams and business processes.

SAS Viya Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server provides a standardized way to expose SAS analytics, models and decisioning capabilities to external AI agents. By using SAS Viya MCP, organizations can embed SAS’ trusted analytics, governance and domain intelligence into their own agents from the LLM interface of their choice, such as Claude, without duplicating logic or bypassing enterprise controls.

SAS Agentic AI Accelerator enables teams across all skill levels (no-code, low-code and developers) to design and operationalize AI agents with governance and trust. The accelerator provides a curated collection of code, components, interfaces and best practices to help teams build, govern, and deploy AI agents within SAS Viya, moving from experimentation to production in a repeatable, governed way.

SAS Retrieval Agent Manager (RAM) is a no-code solution built on the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) framework that streamlines the process of transforming raw unstructured data into context-aware AI responses. While currently only available as a standalone product, SAS plans to integrate RAM capabilities into SAS Viya, further enabling agents and assistants to ground responses in enterprise context for accurate, trusted decisioning.

Together, these updates position SAS Viya as a governed, enterprise-ready platform for agentic AI, supporting AI assistants and intelligent agents that work together to compound value and turn trusted insights into real-world decisions at scale.

Learn more about SAS Agentic AI solutions.

Today's announcement was made at SAS Innovate, the company’s global data and AI conference, as SAS celebrates 50 years of innovation. This year's event is proudly supported by our partner sponsors, including Microsoft, Intel and AWS.

About SAS

SAS is a global leader in data and AI. With SAS software and industry-specific solutions, organizations transform data into trusted decisions. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW^®.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2026 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.