SAS announces new AI offering in the Viya ecosystem. Viya Workbench and App Factory allow businesses to build their own applications in an accessible way.

SAS is a big fan of artificial intelligence and is clearly showing this to the world at its Explore conference. The company is pushing to further add AI to its portfolio without favoring any particular provider. This is according to new announcements for the Viya ecosystem and Customer Intelligence 360.

Bring your own AI

For Customer Intelligence 360 ​​​​introduces SAS Bring your own AI-Principle. SAS opens the doors of the marketing data platform to third-party generative AI models, be it OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or other players in this sector. Through the integration module, customers can determine which capabilities of the model they want to use and how they want to further train it with their own data.

The addition of AI can be useful in marketing to create personalized messages. Artificial intelligence analyzes all the touchpoints you have already had with the customer and tries to get a 360° view of the customer. This allows your marketing and sales teams to hit the customer’s nerve. Salesforce is also trying to achieve this with its Data Cloud and the Einstein Copilot announced yesterday.

Do it yourself

The Belgians are born do-it-yourselfers, so the announcements for SAS Viya will undoubtedly make your mouth water. SAS adds one more thing to Viya Workbench And App Factory. These SaaS platforms create a “lightweight,” cloud-native development environment where companies can build their own purpose-built, AI-driven applications. “The Workbench is a stepping stone towards SAS Viya, while the App Factory allows you to fully ramp up app development,” says CTO Bryan Harris during his keynote at Explore. Multiple programming languages ​​are supported.

SAS Viya Workbench and App Factory enter preview today and will be generally available in early 2024. To demonstrate the possibilities, SAS already used its own app factory to create the Energy Forecast Cloud to develop a platform that uses AI models to accurately predict peak demand from energy sources.

During the opening debates, SAS also emphasized the importance of “responsible” AI, a discourse it has been preaching for some time. SAS wants to encourage itself and other companies using its platforms to ensure that AI is only used for good purposes.