SAS Viya Expands Generative AI Capabilities with New Data Maker and Industry-Specific Assistants

LAS VEGAS, April 18, 2024 — So many organizations have jumped on the GenAI bandwagon in the last year, but are those efforts delivering results yet? If the organization uses the SAS Viya data and AI platform, the answer is a resounding yes. Infused with large language model (LLM) orchestration strength, SAS Viya is already helping customers accelerate efficiency and productivity.

Marinela Profi, SAS’ Product Marketing Manager for Data Science and Open-Source, discusses Viya Copilot at SAS Innovate. Image credit: SAS.

Throughout 2024, SAS will continue delivering innovation by broadening its trustworthy GenAI footprint with the introduction of its own synthetic data generator – SAS Data Maker – and by offering industry-specific GenAI assistants.

Learn more about Viya LLM orchestration and other GenAI capabilities in this solution brief: Accelerate productivity with generative AI and SAS Viya.

“SAS’ guiding principle is everyone should be able to query data and perform complex analytical operations in every phase of the data and analytics life cycle, and generative AI is crucial in this democratization journey,” said Wiktor Markiewicz, Senior Market Research Analyst at IDC. “But most leaders don’t understand AI technology and how they can apply it meaningfully. Having an already trusted data and AI platform available removes the guesswork and kickstarts the generative AI journey.”

As organizations explore GenAI, SAS prioritizes identifying industry-driven and ethically applied use cases. SAS enables secure adoption and fosters accelerated productivity and trusted results across diverse industries and regulatory landscapes. SAS’ GenAI functionality lives in leading products like Viya and SAS Customer Intelligence 360:

• GenAI orchestration: Viya integrates external GenAI models with existing business processes and systems, orchestrating LLMs for end-to-end enterprise use cases. These capabilities are now available in SAS Viya.
• Viya Copilot: Enhances productivity for developers, data scientists and business users with a personal assistant that accelerates analytical, business and industry tasks. Viya Copilot offers diverse tools for tasks like code generation, data cleaning, data exploration, marketing planning, journey design and knowledge gap analysis. The first iteration of Viya Copilot is available through an invitation-only private preview.
• SAS Data Maker: Addresses data privacy and scarcity challenges by generating high-quality synthetic tabular data without compromising sensitive information, enabling organizations to address data privacy. SAS Data Maker is now available in private preview.
• Customer engagement: SAS continues to infuse GenAI capabilities into its flagship MarTech solution, SAS Customer Intelligence 360, to help marketers elevate the customer experience. SAS Customer Intelligence 360 already offers GenAI assistance on streamlining marketing planning, journey design and content and creative development. SAS is now introducing three new capabilities in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 for marketers: using GenAI to build recommended audiences based on natural language prompts, a chat experience to interpret audience data and a GenAI suggestion service for email subject lines.

The GenAI functionality of Viya makes a meaningful difference to customers planning to:

• Accelerate innovation: Seamlessly integrate GenAI models into decisioning workflows, AI/ML applications and existing business processes by using decisioning flow tools like SAS Intelligent Decisioning.
• Protect data: Support user privacy and security with robust data quality measures, including synthetic data generation, data minimization, anonymization and encryption, so sensitive information remains safeguarded.
• Create trustworthy and explainable results: Data experts can apply natural language processing techniques to preprocess data and explain the generated output, minimizing hallucinations and token costs.
• Enhance governance: Use built-in tools to create workflows that validate the life cycle of LLMs, including model risk management.
• Make more precise decisions: Quantitative decisioning capabilities, critical for successful GenAI reasoning, are built into the Viya platform.

Today’s announcement was made at SAS Innovate, the data and AI experience for business leaders, technical users and SAS Partners.

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Source: SAS