And with that, the general session has come to a close. Stay tuned for all the latest from SAS Innovate 2025, right here on ITPro.
"We are here to listen to your business goals and apply the right technology to you for you to achieve that," he says.
"And we are here to help you thrive in your role. SAS is building Cutting edge Al capability so you can deliver outcomes that outperform, so that you can gain a decision advantage."
We're now handed back to Harris, who rounds out the opening session with a commitment to meeting customer needs.
Asked about the future of fraud, Zambrano says that defense will rest on adopting and using generative AI faster than adversaries.
He adds that attacks will only become easier through technological innovation.
With the game in full swing, Abagnale says that attackers can carry out the kind of fraud he did with much more ease these days, given the technology at their disposal.
Zambrano concurs, adding that this is the reason for defense at scale.
"We're seeing a need to deploy technology that can outsmart them."
“But today you’re dealing with someone thousands of miles away, they never see you, they never see your victim, you never see the perpetrator, so there is no emotion and they will steal everything from you.”
“50 years ago the fraudster was a conman acting domestically,” Abagnale says, adding that there was a chance for fraudsters to get emotional and decide to hold back from completely ruining victims.
To find out more, we're playing a game of 'Former Fraudster vs Fraud Fighter'. Our contestants are Tatiana Zambrano, head of fraud extraction at Truist and Frank Abagnale, bestselling author and subject of the movie Catch Me If You Can.
“You never know the face of a fraudster,” Bradley says, necessitating advanced technology and a need to get “inside the mind of a fraudster”.
Fraud is a key focus for SAS, as we're now hearing from Stu Bradley, SVP Risk, Fraud and Compliance at SAS.
For example, CNG Holdings was able to get over 90% of its new customers through the application process within 90 days, using SAS Solutions, a result Boyd says was previously "unheard of" for the customer. The work also reduced the financial solution provider's false positive rate to near zero and reduce fraud by around 30%.
Banking customers rely on SAS Solutions predictive models for credit scores, fraud detection, and governance, he says.
Boyd adds SAS has been the "gold standard" for drug discovery for decades, was the partner of choice for banks in the wake of the Patriot Act, and a key player for vaccine development during the pandemic.
"For decades, we've worked with domain industry experts to solve everyday business departments," Boyd says. "Think credit scoring, manufacturing, drug safety. We are working throughout your entire value chain to make your jobs easier."
SAS is using the session to stress how much it's already trusted, with decades of experience working hand-in-hand with protected industries. We're welcoming John Boyd, VP Solutions Product Management at SAS, onto the stage to tell us more about how it helps its customers address the biggest challenges.
SAS has announced a range of industry-specific models and has more in the pipeline aimed at specific industries. Read more about SAS' new AI models in our dedicated coverage here.
Sglavo says the models are lightweight and easy to implement, as well as built with specific industry applications in mind. They're also, he says, quick to initialize.
Adopting AI can be challenging, the pair say, and this is where SAS' ready-made AI models come into play.
Here to tell us more directly about AI is Manisha Khanna, senior manager product marketing at SAS and Udo Sglavo, VP Applied Al and Modeling at SAS.
Peterson says SAS wants to inspire its users to be innovative and to empower its AI and modelling teams to cut down time consuming tasks.
Users can also ask Viya Copilot to 'improve' a specific node.
"By going beyond just answering questions and actually performing actions, SAS Viya Copilot unlocks the potential all types of users," Tomlinson says.
In an example showing Viya Copilot's summary of a forest model, made up of decision trees, Tomlinson shows how a user can ask for more information on the node's receiver operating characteristic (ROC), using RAG to draw on enterprise documentation so the information is as accurate as possible.
Here to explain more is Ben Tomlinson, principal software developer at SAS. He demos how Viya Copilot can be used to build out a data pipeline, or explain an existing node.
We're moving fast here in Orlando. Peterson notes that not everyone is a data scientist and this is where SAS Viya Copilot in Model Studio comes in.
Once you've completed the initial model setup, Keen says, you don't have to ever again. Users across an organization can simply use the trained model to repetitively generate data going forward.
Users can then select the specific model they want to use to generate the data, whether or not they want the enhanced privacy of differential privacy – "smart noise" added to the data to prevent it from being reverse-engineered – and then generate the data.
To start, Keen says, users select their source data and let Data Maker automatically work out the structure of the data. In the latest version, Keen says, users can also highlight multi-table and time-series data.
Also in 2024, SAS acquired UK synthetic data startup Hazy. Here to tell us how its software has improved Data Maker is Harry Keen, founder and former CEO at Hazy and product evangelist at SAS.
Synthetic data is one route to meeting these needs, Peterson says, which is why SAS announced its synthetic data generation tool Data Maker last year.
We're talking about Data now, with Peterson underlining the importance of available data to power AI models.
To round his time off, Henry shows off a simple app he created within Viya Workbench, to rate the sentiment of SAS Innovate 2024 attendee reviews.
Peterson wants to know if more advanced models can be used in SAS Viya Workbench. Henry says you can, giving the example of the textbert model being used to score sentiment in text.
In his practical example, analyzing review data from Amazon products, Henry starts in Python and moves to R, showing the complexity of the process, then shows that the workflow in SAS is much simpler.
Henry says performing sentiment analysis, stemming, and limitization within Viya Workbench is straightforward, requiring just a few lines of code.
That developer was Joseph Henry, distinguished software developer at SAS, who's here now to show us SAS Viya Workbench live.
We're starting off with a demo of Viya Workbench, the SAS cloud-based development environment. Peterson says SAS Viya Workbench was almost canned in the development phase but a developer “cornered me in a hallway” and urged him to consider the potential of the platform.
"At SAS, we really understand how transformative Al can be. But we also understand the challenges that you face and the problems that you are trying to solve,” Peterson says.
“It's why we've created products that give you more data, more flexibility, and more control over how you get your job done whether you're a developer or a business decision maker, the things that you will see this morning can change the way that you work and the way that you run your organizations.”
With that, we're moving onto some of the innovations coming to the SAS platform. To hear more, we've welcomed Jared Peterson, SVP Platform Engineering at SAS, to the stage.
Using traditional 'solver' algorithms, Comstock says P&G was able to break this problem down in around six hours. Using quantum AI with SAS, it cut this down to two minutes but introduced some unwanted results. Finally, it settled on a hybrid approach, in which quantum AI was mainly used and the traditional solvers were only used for the final calculations – for an overall processing time of 12 minutes.
P&G looked at a hundred ingredients across five manufacturing tanks and worked out the total number of mixture combinations possible was 100 to the 14th power – more than the number of atoms in the universe.
P&G has been doing business with SAS for 45 years, Comstock says. The firm faces the constant issue of creating all its various products while ensuring some ingredients never mix with one another – to illustrate her point, Comstock encourages the audience to walk down their grocery aisle and consider all the different kinds of shampoo and the different ingredients they have.
SAS is committed to solving some of the most complex problems in computing, Harris says, and is increasingly looking to quantum AI to overcome this. Here to tell us more is Krista Comstock, director of product and innovation at P&G.
"I don't know, maybe see what the impact of tariffs are, that might be helpful now," he adds, to audience laughter.
Manufacturing is just one sector that can benefit from digital twins, Harris says, with others including financial services, healthcare, and the supply chain.
The digital twin can also be used to improve safety. “According to US labor statistics, a person dies every 90 minutes in the workplace,” Harris says, explaining how realistic simulations like those SAS and Epic Games are making can be used to train computer vision models to make them safer.
SAS has worked with the paper product manufacturer Georgia-Pacific, which has been using the digital twins to simulate the movement workers, vehicles, and autonomous vehicles around its manufacturing environment. We're told it's already worked out more efficient ways to route traffic through its sites.
To bring this to life, SAS has partnered with Epic, the games company behind Unreal Engine, to simulate real-world and create synthetic data in extreme detail. You can read more in our detailed coverage here.
SAS wants digital twins to be the most sophsticated simulated environments they can be, he says, to enable complex systems to be better understood.
We're now moving on to digital twins, which Harris says give organizations the power of 'what if' when it comes to their data.
Controlled sectors such as banking might want even more information on model governance. So at the end of the process, users can use see a ‘lineage’ for the models, from SAS Intelligent Decisioning, to SAS Model Manager, SAS Model Studio, SAS Information Catalog, and SAS Studio.
This can be especially useful, Harris says, when a user is looking to understand how an agent made by another department in their company works.
In the Viya dashboard, we're shown, a user tracking mortgage applications can interrogate the decisions agents make, check the model they're running on, and see every step it's taken to come to its decision.
In a perfect system, he says an AI agent could autonomously detect and denies fraudulent transactions in a finance system. But it's not always that straightforward – which has led SAS to a 'human in the loop' approach.
Agentic AI can help address these concerns, SAS believes, and Harris is now giving us a practical example of SAS AI Agents in action.
“On average, applicants need credit scores 120 points higher than white applicants to receive the same approval rate,” he explains.
The fix to this issue? A prompt urging stressing the importance of removing bias. It's a great example, Harris says, of why organizations need to take governance and implementation of AI very seriously.
Harris says generative AI is a powerful technology but comes with limitations. For example, he cites a recent study which found that LLMs recommend more denials and higher interest rates for black applicants than identical white applicants. Harris notes this systemic issue was found in models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
"It really feels like all you need to do is sprinkle a little generative AI in your enterprise and all your problems will magically disappear," he says.
"Can you feel it?" he asks the audience, to laughter.
The latest innovation, Harris says, is AI and this can be harnessed with decision intelligence from SAS. This, he says, can cut through the difficulties and confusion associated with adopting AI.
Harris has now taken to the stage. He begins by noting SAS is nearing its 50th anniversary and has achieved a lot along the way – billions of lines of code, its own programming language, and many generations of technology.
We're now off in earnest, with a sizzle reel beginning with a word from Goodnight, who stresses that organizations have more data to handle than ever before.
Next, we'll have a series of speakers running us through the newest announcements from SAS – more on those as they come. Rounding it out, we can expect to hear from Frank Abagnale, of Catch Me If You Can fame, on how we can tackle fraud.
To begin with, we're told, we'll have a keynote from Bryan Harris, CTO at SAS, looking at the specific outcomes that SAS' technology can unlock.
Moon says attendees can expect news on groundbreaking technology and thought provoking hands-on opportunities, as well as "lots and lots of fun surprises".
And we're off, with an opening welcome from Dominque Moon, customer success manager at SAS.
But a little more unusually, we're also expecting a virtual address from Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft. We'll bring you that as it happens.
Just under ten minutes to go until the day-one keynote begins. As one would expect, we'll hear from Jim Goodnight, CEO at SAS.
We were told how Orlando Magic has worked with SAS to improve customer outreach, processing game data to deliver targeted emails to fans. The same partnership has also improved ticket revenue by giving season ticket holders an easy way to let Orlando Magic sell their tickets if they can't attend a game, in return for virtual credit.
On that note, assembled media were last night shown around the Orlando Magic Kia Center, the practice and exercise space for the Orlando Magic NBA team.
It's bright and early in Orlando and attendees are gearing up for the day-one general session. Based on the products and demos on show in the expo hall, we're expecting to hear lots about AI in SAS Viya and doubtless some customer testimonies for how SAS has benefited their business.
Hello from Orlando, where the sun is not yet in the sky. While we wait for the conference proper to get underway, why not read ITPro's analysis of the biggest talking points at SAS Innovate 2025.