Image: GoldenDayz/Envato
SAS expands Viya with governed AI agents, copilots, and new governance tools aimed at helping enterprises manage shadow AI and build trust in automation.
Enterprise AI agents are moving faster than many companies can govern them.
At SAS Innovate in Grapevine, Texas, SAS announced a slate of AI tools to make agentic AI more trustworthy, including new Viya assistants, an agentic AI accelerator, industry-specific agents, and a governance product called SAS AI Navigator. The announcements come as enterprises face growing concerns about shadow AI, compliance exposure, and the trustworthiness of autonomous systems in production.
The company’s message was clear: AI governance is no longer just a compliance function. SAS wants to position it as the foundation that lets businesses use AI agents without handing them the keys unsupervised.
“AI governance is too often thought of as a compliance measure, when it is actually a growth driver,” Reggie Townsend, VP of SAS AI Ethics, Governance and Social Impact, said during the conference. “Instead of fears of shadow AI putting the organization at risk, AI governance empowers people to push the limits of AI within a structured, transparent, and secure environment.”
SAS has expanded its SAS Viya platform with governed AI assistants and agentic AI capabilities.
These AI assistants and agent infrastructure are said to help business and analytics teams move from experimentation to governed, production-ready intelligence. This includes:
“The role of human expertise in operationalizing agentic AI is elevated by automation, not diminished by it,” Jared Peterson, senior vice president of Global Engineering at SAS, said during the conference. “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.”
Many businesses are experimenting with AI.
But confidence in the outcomes can be low, and the talent to exploit their potential is often lacking. Hence, SAS has begun releasing a series of industry accelerators aimed at verticals ranging from finance to the factory floor. They compensate for a lack of sector-specific AI expertise and help organizations address budget or time constraints that often inhibit the use of AI.
SAS Supply Chain Agent streamlines supply and operations planning, a process retailers and manufacturers use to manage supply chains as markets.
For example, someone can use this agent to run a scenario such as a sudden 15% drop in demand. The agent would help the organization explore possible outcomes, explain what is driving the change, and support its recommendations by showing how the agent arrived at its decisions.
In addition, SAS Customer Intelligence 360, the company’s marketing analytics tool, has added agentic AI capabilities. Specialized AI agents work alongside marketers and help them to act faster without sacrificing trust. These agents operate within defined guardrails and ensure that transparency, governance, and human oversight are maintained.
Human-in-the-loop control is embedded directly into marketing workflows. Rather than a single, monolithic AI, a multi-agent system has been evolved within SAS Customer Intelligence 360 so that specialized, context-aware agents do tasks tailored by the marketer.
Speaker after speaker at the show emphasized governance. Townsend said that almost half of AI users face a trust dilemma: they like the promise of AI but are hesitant to turn over control to AI agents due to risk. As a result, the bulk of AI potential is untapped.
“AI is great for optimization but lacks judgment when it comes to dealing with ambiguity and competing values,” said Townsend. “Governance has to be convenient rather than a drag on the business and innovation velocity.”
He announced SAS AI Navigator to bring order to AI chaos by governing AI implementations and providing the necessary safeguards. It achieves this by compiling an AI inventory and aligning AI use cases with government regulations and internal policies. Available in Q3 2026 on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, SAS AI Navigator is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.
Companies using chatbots to interact with customers, for instance, would be able to govern agents or models such as Claude or Microsoft Copilot and apply policies to ensure regulatory compliance. SAS AI Navigator offers a unified view of all the models and tools the organization uses, whether that is large language models, AI agents, open-source tools, or SAS models.
In parallel, SAS has been updating some of its other tools and platforms to accommodate AI.
SAS Data Management, for example, has been refreshed to make it ready for agents and automation to operate within it. By embedding governance, lineage, and performance directly into data workflows, confidence in AI outcomes is increased without sacrificing trust or control.
The hype surrounding quantum computing is ramping up steadily.
To prepare for the disruption predicted when quantum computing is fully integrated with AI, SAS is creating the SAS Quantum Lab. Coming in Q4,2026, it will complement quantum experts’ existing work and empower users who may not be quantum physicists yet are ready to explore, test, and validate their ideas.
The purpose of the lab is to reduce the cost of quantum AI exploration and help users avoid false signals as they explore this technology credibly.
In preparation, SAS has been doing its homework on quantum computing. It just completed a survey to find the principal barriers to quantum AI adoption. These were:
The survey also uncovered the most immediate use cases enterprises are considering for quantum computing. One of the most promising and immediate use cases is enhancing the accuracy of fraud detection systems in financial services by enabling more efficient identification of complex transaction patterns.
Further use cases being considered include optimizing 5G network path traffic in real time, accelerating molecular simulations and the drug discovery process for new therapeutic candidates, and optimizing logistics problems.
“SAS Quantum Lab democratizes access to quantum AI,” said Amy Stout, head of Quantum Product Strategy at SAS. “It helps organizations to start and scale up during their quantum AI journey while lowering the skills barrier, helping organizations prove value by developing the best use case for quantum while reducing cost.”
Despite its portfolio of analytics and AI tools and agents that eliminate much of the work humans used to do, the company continually insists that people remain as relevant as ever. SAS preaches that AI should be seen as a means to enhance human ingenuity rather than replace it.
“Remember that AI is just the instrument,” said Jared Peterson, SVP Global Engineering. SAS during the show. “It only comes to life if someone knows how to play.”
For more on the risks behind enterprise AI agents, read our deep dive on how autonomous systems are reshaping security, from prompt injection to zero-trust defenses.
Originally from Scotland, Drew Robb has been a full-time writer for 25 years. He lives in Florida and specializes in IT, engineering, and business. As well as TechRepublic, he writes for a wide range of magazines including Gas Turbine World, SDxCentral, HR Magazine, and eWeek.
