SAS has announced major enhancements to its flagship SAS Viya platform at the SAS Innovate 2025 conference in Orlando.
These improvements aim to accelerate productivity, bolster trust and democratise advanced analytics for enterprises of all sizes.
The new offerings span synthetic data generation, AI agent deployment and expanded cloud services.
Leveraging technology from SAS’ recent acquisition of UK-based Hazy, the SAS Data Maker secure synthetic data generator enables enterprises to overcome data privacy and scarcity challenges by generating realistic, privacy-preserving datasets. Currently in private preview, the tool is set for broad release in Q3 of 2025.
Making its debut is SAS Viya Intelligent Decisioning, which empowers enterprises to build and deploy intelligent AI agents with customisable levels of autonomy. This lets enterprises strike the right balance between automation and human oversight, tailored to the complexity and risk of each business task. The platform’s orchestration agent can coordinate specialised agents, such as those for complaints, churn or policy management-enabling robust, trustworthy decision-making pipelines.
SAS also introduced SAS Managed Cloud Services: Viya Essentials, a packaged managed service for small and mid-size businesses. The out-of-the-box solution lowers the barrier to entry for advanced analytics, offering select Viya products in a fully hosted environment.
It previewed the Viya Copilot AI-driven conversational assistant built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry. Designed to accelerate analytical and business tasks, Copilot provides AI-powered model development and code assistance for users across skill levels. Currently available via invitation-only preview, it is expected to launch in Q3.
The SAS Viya Workbench cloud-based coding environment for developers and data scientists has received notable upgrades. In 2025, the platform adds support for R coding, expands integration options and increases availability across major cloud marketplaces, including Microsoft Azure.
“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,” said said Bryan Harris (top), Chief Technology Officer of SAS.
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