On the SAS Innovate convention I’m attending in Orlando, Florida this week, there was a joint look by SAS CEO and cofounder Jim Goodnight and Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella, who mentioned the way forward for synthetic intelligence and its position in enterprise decision-making. The 2 tech leaders emphasised the necessity for accountable, AI-driven selections that have an effect on companies, customers, and society at giant.
Goodnight mentioned giant language fashions (LLMs) that energy generative AI (GenAI) are inadequate for superior enterprise enterprise analytics.
“GenAI doesn’t substitute all the things in analytics, information science, and enterprise intelligence,” he mentioned. “Within the enterprise, complicated workflows must be arrange on the appropriate decision-making framework.”
Nadella concurred.
“GenAI can be utilized to create a plan, however execution within the enterprise wants establishing of the appropriate AI workflows,” mentioned Nadella. “AI is altering how folks work. Monumental progress has been made, however we’ve got a protracted approach to go.”
Nadella likened AI’s development lately to Moore’s Legislation — as a substitute of compute energy doubling each two years, it’s the capabilities of AI fashions which can be accelerating. The good points made in pre-training of fashions and testing of fashions are in hyperdrive, Nadella mentioned. It’s as much as enterprise distributors and builders to parlay these capabilities into helpful merchandise.
Reflecting on what GenAI was attaining over the previous 18 months, Nadella famous that, whereas early functions targeted on primary code technology, emails, and question responses, present capabilities enable AI assistants to assign duties to colleagues and handle workflows.
“AI is altering how I work and the work artifacts that I exploit,” mentioned Nadella. “AI has diminished the time wanted for some workloads from eight hours to half-hour.”
SEE: SAS Innovate Keynote: SAS Says ‘Goodbye, GenAI; Hiya, Agentic AI’
SAS Resolution Builder on Microsoft Cloth
SAS and Microsoft have been working collectively for 5 years; Goodnight showcased their collaboration on SAS Resolution Builder and SAS Viya Copilot.
SAS Resolution Builder is a cloud-based clever decisioning resolution, which is obtainable as a Microsoft Cloth workload. It helps enterprises make higher, sooner, and safer selections by compiling a number of synthetic intelligence fashions, guidelines, and process logic right into a composite workflow. This streamlines the analytics lifecycle by enabling organizations to design, combine, and deploy fashions and selections.
With entry to information by means of Microsoft Cloth’s OneLake, customers can design, combine, check, and run selections throughout the Cloth atmosphere. Integration additionally extends to Azure AI Companies, with SAS resolution intelligence supporting key generative AI components like LLMs straight inside a choice circulation.
“Bringing SAS Resolution Builder to Cloth takes decision-making nearer to the information,” mentioned Nadella. “It additionally gives wider entry to SAS expertise and AI instruments through Azure Market.”
SAS Viya Copilot: AI-powered coding and modelling assistant
One other joint undertaking is SAS Viya Copilot; this AI-driven conversational assistant is embedded into the SAS Viya platform by means of Microsoft Azure AI Foundry integration. The advantages embody democratization of AI, rushing up information and AI growth for larger person productiveness, offering AI-driven intelligence and resolution help, and the retention of human-in-the-loop oversight for trusted autonomy.
GitHub Copilot made coding simpler for in style languages like Python and R, however SAS customers lacked related help, and Viya Copilot fills the hole as a result of it helps customers generate, clarify, and annotate SAS code. As well as, it helps mannequin pipeline growth. Customers acquire entry to a specialised AI assistant to assist construct, clarify, and enhance mannequin pipelines. This function is beneficial for information scientists and enterprise analysts who’re constructing AI and analytical fashions and helps them develop higher fashions sooner whereas sustaining management and transparency.
Quantum AI on the horizon
Goodnight and Nadella concluded by heralding the chances that quantum computing would possibly unleash for AI. Nadella defined that present simulations solely approximate the bodily world. Quantum capabilities could make true simulation of the true world a actuality, he mentioned. In healthcare and biology, he sees infinite potentialities.
“We will actually push the frontiers of data ahead by addressing quantum computing and AI to computational chemistry,” mentioned Nadella.