SAS Innovate 2025: Pursuing pragmatic AI

As CISA delivered an eleventh-hour reprieve for the CVE database, AWS reportedly began to pause some data center leases

The text "SAS Innovate 2025: Pursuing pragmatic AI" on a blurry photo taken on the conference floor at SAS Innovate 2025. The words "SAS Innovate 2025" are in yellow while the rest are in white. The ITPro Podcast logo is shown in the bottom right corner.
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What do you do when you want to get your enterprise data into a usable format? And how can you make better use of the data you already use, through the likes of analytics, AI, and even quantum computing?

All these questions and more have been front and center at SAS Innovate 2025, the data and analytics veteran’s annual conference held in Orlando, Florida.

As the week has pressed on, what have we learned about SAS’ view of its place in the rapidly changing world of business technology? And what sets it apart from its competitors?

In this episode, Jane once again speaks to Rory, to learn more about his SAS Innovate 2025 coverage and the key themes and announcements.

Highlights

"When it comes to implementing things like AI agents, there have been huge discussion and really in-depth conversations around governance. So I wrote a piece on this governance angle, based on the speech by Reggie Townsend, who's the VP for Data Ethics at SAS, and the crux of his argument was successful AI implementation rests on having really, really strong AI governance policies."

"What SAS and P&G found was, when they ran this problem using a traditional, what's called a solver algorithm, that's traditional computing, they could crunch the numbers and solve it in six hours. When they used quantum annealing, they could solve it in two minutes, but they also introduced some unwanted errors right at the end, which is what you would expect with relying on kind of quantum to get most of the way. So they settled, eventually, on a hybrid approach, where they they did the bulk of the calculation with quantum annealing and then they used solvers at the end to get to the desired result, and that was 12 minutes."

"I think I've been pleasantly surprised by the focus on AI governance. I think this has been missing in some discussions in the last year, and it's good to see that being focused on, to the extent that it has even been focused on as an unavoidable step, number one for AI implementation. I think that definitely will have reassured some of SAS' customers, particularly when it comes to those in controlled industries, heavily regulated industries, who are still worried about implementing it."

Footnotes

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Rory Bathgate
Rory Bathgate
Features and Multimedia Editor

Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.

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