SAS has announced major enhancements to its , introducing new AI assistants, agentic AI infrastructure, and enterprise-ready acceleration tools aimed at helping organizations move from generative AI experimentation to governed, production-scale intelligence.
Announced during SAS Innovate 2026, the new capabilities strengthen SAS Viya’s role as a secure and enterprise-focused AI platform built for analytics, automation, and intelligent decision-making.
The updates include the launch of SAS Viya Copilot, a conversational AI assistant embedded directly into the analytics workflow. Unlike standalone AI chat tools, the copilot operates within the SAS Viya environment, helping users analyze data, generate SAS and Python code, build model pipelines, and create dashboards using natural language prompts.
“The role of human expertise in operationalizing agentic AI is not diminished by automation; it’s elevated.” — Jared Peterson
SAS also introduced the SAS Viya Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, which allows enterprises to securely expose SAS analytics and decisioning capabilities to external AI agents and large language models using the open MCP standard. In addition, the new SAS Agentic AI Accelerator provides a framework for organizations to build, govern, and deploy AI agents across enterprise environments.
According to SAS, the latest capabilities are designed to ensure AI systems remain aligned with enterprise governance, security, and human oversight requirements.
“The role of human expertise in operationalizing agentic AI is not diminished by automation; it’s elevated,” said Jared Peterson. “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.”
SAS highlighted that the platform enhancements are especially important as enterprises accelerate investments in agentic AI while facing growing concerns around governance, explainability, compliance, and operational trust.
The company also announced industry-specific copilots for financial risk management and healthcare analytics, with additional AI assistants planned for banking, supply chain optimization, and manufacturing later in 2026.
