From synthetic data to AI agents, new SAS Viya innovations boost speed, productivity and trust

ORLANDO, Fla., May 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SAS Innovate -- Data and AI leader SAS today announced its latest offerings on the SAS^® Viya^® platform, spanning the latest leaps in AI advancement to scale and galvanize human productivity and decision-making.

"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," said Kathy Lange, research director for AI Software at IDC. "SAS continues to develop offerings that streamline and automate the AI life cycle and enable organizations to make better business decisions faster."

The latest and upcoming SAS Viya debuts include:

• SAS Data Maker – Introduced through private preview last year, SAS' secure synthetic data generator helps organizations 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, SAS Managed Cloud Services: SAS Viya Essentials was launched in early 2025. Currently targeted to small and mid-size businesses, SAS Managed Cloud Services: Viya Essentials 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 now include availability on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Learn more about SAS data and AI products at: sas.com/viya.

Unparalleled productivity, trusted results
SAS is breaking through the AI and GenAI hype to deliver real capabilities that drive real results with SAS Viya – a comprehensive data and AI platform that empowers people of all skill levels to participate in the analytics process.

The SAS Viya platform delivers users a choice to be a builder of AI with end-to-end platform tools, or buyers of AI solutions and model packages – each delivering scale and productivity to enable better decisions and faster time to value. Developers, data scientists, IT professionals and business analysts can collaborate seamlessly within the SAS Viya ecosystem and throughout the data and AI life cycle to make intelligent decisions. SAS Viya accelerates productivity across diverse industries and regulatory landscapes, offering a clear advantage to organizations, 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 – all while helping them increase innovation, expedite decision making and drive revenue growth.

"The current economic climate and rapid pace of AI innovation can feel intense and overwhelming," said Bryan Harris, Chief Technology Officer at SAS. "Our goal is to deliver cutting-edge AI capabilities that help organizations 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 their state-of-the-science 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. The result? Fathom Science gained statistical and machine learning validation of its whale location prediction model.

Today's announcement was made at SAS Innovate, the data and AI experience for business leaders, technical users and SAS Partners. Keep up with the latest news from SAS by visiting sas.com/news or follow us on LinkedIn or X.

About SAS
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Editorial Contact:
Jennifer James
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