SAS commits $1B to AI-powered industry solutions

Multiyear investment will fuel cloud-first solutions across numerous industries

SAS, the leader in analytics, will invest $1 billion over the next three years to further develop advanced analytics solutions targeted at the unique needs of specific industries. In banking, government, insurance, health care, retail, manufacturing, energy and more, SAS will build upon its decades long focus on providing tailored solutions to industry challenges. This industry commitment and the rapid time-to-value these solutions deliver are key SAS differentiators.

All industry solutions will run on SAS^® Viya^®, SAS’ cloud-native, massively parallel AI and analytics platform.

“Businesses face many challenges, from the threat of economic recession and stressed supply chains to workforce shortages and regulatory changes,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. “With insights from industry-focused analytics, resilient organisations can find opportunity in these challenges.

“Through this investment, SAS will continue to support companies using AI, machine learning and advanced analytics to fight fraud, manage risk, better serve customers and citizens, and much more. We remain steadfast in our ongoing commitment to innovation while delivering the market’s best analytics.”

R&D innovation + industry expertise = analytics for the people
The billion-dollar investment includes direct research and development, industry-focused line-of-business teams, and industry marketing efforts. It will fund the innovative work of SAS data scientists, statisticians and software developers working with consultants, systems engineers and marketers with specific industry experience.

The investment is in line with the trend toward democratising data analytics. By putting the power of advanced analytics in the hands of more people with varied experience and job roles, organisations and society will benefit. It’s what SAS calls analytics for everyone, everywhere.

As organisations continue to embrace AI, machine learning, computer vision and Internet of Things (IoT) analytics to gain valuable insights, people of all skill levels can participate in the analytics process through low- or no-code options like those delivered by solutions running on SAS Viya.

Data scientists and statisticians can use SAS’ industry solutions, benefiting from AI, machine learning and other powerful analytics. And importantly, so too can business analysts to better detect and prevent fraud, city planners to improve public health and safety, medical personnel to enhance patient care, and frontline workers to optimise manufacturing assembly lines.

Recent SAS industry solutions
SAS already offers a wide variety of industry-specific solutions. These will be further refined through the ongoing investment, and SAS will develop new solutions to address additional needs.

Some recent examples of SAS industry expertise include:

Navigating volatility and enhancing customer experience in financial services
Last year’s economic headwinds roiled global markets, reversing post-pandemic rebounds and forging an increasingly precarious risk landscape. To help banking and insurance customers meet the challenges ahead, SAS acquired Kamakura Corp., a financial risk firm revered for its rigor, particularly in integrated balance sheet management.

The acquisition, the largest in SAS history, added some of the most renowned names in quantitative risk management to SAS’ roster. It’s also accelerating advances in SAS’ suite of integrated risk solutions. Already, SAS Asset and Liability Management (ALM) has been retooled for SAS Viya, helping banks predict and mitigate the liquidity and balance sheet risks that triggered recent bank failures.

SAS is also prioritising innovation in enterprise decisioning. Connecting siloed functions (e.g., onboarding, credit risk, fraud detection, marketing) on a unified, AI-powered architecture – and using shared data and analytics – is helping financial firms streamline operational complexity while yielding faster, more accurate decisions that boost customer experience.

Protecting taxpayer dollars
Every year, governments across the world lose huge sums due to tax evasion and avoidance. This weakens a government’s ability to provide essential services to citizens.

SAS Tax Compliance helps governments protect their revenue streams by applying advanced analytics to vast amounts of tax data to automatically monitor and detect cases of non-compliance and fraud.

As a result, government tax agencies can increase early identification of potential fraud, uncover emerging tax fraud schemes, accelerate audits and get old cases off the books.

Dynamic insurance pricing for a fraught market
The Insurance Information Institute named 2022 the worst year in more than a decade for property and casualty (P&C) insurance. Through disasters like Hurricane Ian, the US P&C industry alone bore a $26.5 billion underwriting loss, according to research by AM Best.

To stay afloat amid compounding climate risk, insurers must raise premiums to shore up liquidity, frustrating customers in an already unstable market. Quick, accurate and unbiased premium pricing is crucial to remaining solvent and competitive, while promoting consumer peace of mind.

SAS Dynamic Actuarial Modelling provides optimised data preparation and highly flexible modelling capabilities supported by machine learning. This helps insurers offer fair pricing in a fast, fraught market.

Accelerating digital health transformation and therapeutic development
From advancing the development of lifesaving therapeutics to improving patient outcomes and experience, SAS’ industry-leading expertise is at the forefront of better health care.

SAS Health offers industry-specific applications and AI solutions across population health, operations and finance. It helps health care organisations deliver high-quality care that is safer and more cost effective. Whether turning patient population data into analytic-ready cohorts or informing value-based care and payment models, SAS’ intuitive point-and-click interfaces help clinicians and business analysts advance health care transformation and visualise trends once hidden in their data.

SAS also empowers clinical research that leads to new therapies and treatments. For example, about 90% of clinical trials fail to meet enrolment timelines. SAS Clinical Enrollment Simulation uses powerful analytics to inform enrolment planning, helping avoid the devastating delays that often result from missed enrolment targets.

Predict and plan demand for retail and consumer goods
Retailers and consumer goods manufacturers need precise demand planning now more than ever. With help from AI-powered SAS Intelligent Planning Cloud, companies can better anticipate and address shopper needs and shipping disruptions.

This software-as-a-service solution is fully automated end-to-end by SAS Viya analytics and machine learning and is available on the SAS Cloud. With it, retailers and consumer goods companies can quickly transform data into value.

Improving the reliability of electric grids
Nearly one-third of utility power outages are caused by equipment failures. These failures are costly to repair, add risk for employees performing repairs, and leave customers – homes, schools, factories and more – without electricity.

SAS Grid Guardian AI analyses data flowing from IoT sensors mounted to service vehicles such as garbage trucks. These sensors (from SAS partner Exacter) read data on radiofrequency emissions from transmission lines. Then SAS AI, machine learning and streaming analytics analyse this data.

The result? Utility companies can better understand and predict equipment failure before it occurs. And they can prioritise maintenance schedules to reduce service interruptions and crew injuries, all while improving reliability.

Boosting responsible marketing and profitability
Marketers are facing pressure like never before to be responsible and transparent in their use of customer data technologies, while simultaneously being good stewards of brand. Being responsible as a marketer today means accounting for changing customer expectations around privacy, embracing emerging technologies like generative AI, and being able to measure marketing programme value at a moment's notice.

These conditions make responsible marketing an imperative, and SAS Customer Intelligence 360 can help brands use customer data, marketing technology and resources in a responsible manner. With its powerful analytics, brands can create loyalty and trust, ensure legal and ethical compliance, optimise marketing assets, and boost business profitability.

Partners play a key role
SAS’ broad and deep network of partners will help in the development and rollout of industry-specific solutions.

“SAS’ decades long leadership in creating powerful industry solutions and use of SAS Viya to move these solutions to the cloud is one of the key reasons why customers value our partnership,” said Alvaro Celis, VP of Solutions Area ISV Sales for Microsoft. “By tailoring AI and advanced analytics to the precise needs of banking, government, insurance, health care and other industries, SAS and Microsoft have created a crucial differentiator for our joint customers.”

An example of this type of partnership is Azure confidential computing, a new technology – jointly delivered by Microsoft, SAS and chipmaker AMD – designed to provide enhanced protection for highly sensitive data while it is in use in memory. This technology can significantly improve privacy and data security for customers in highly regulated industries such as financial services, health care and government.

SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure will soon include Azure confidential computing capabilities featuring AMD EPYC™ processors with SEV-SNP technology. This will provide SAS Viya customers with an even more secure AI and cloud computing platform to further reduce the risk of a breach and strengthen compliance, while simultaneously giving customers access to larger data pools for more powerful analytic models. The new capabilities will be initially available in the United States, the Netherlands and Ireland, with a wider rollout later.

For more on SAS industry solutions that can help organisations of any size, visit www.sas.com/en_gb/industry.html.

Today’s announcement was made at SAS Innovate, the AI and analytics business conference from analytics leader SAS. To keep up with the latest news from SAS, follow @SASsoftwareNews on Twitter.

About SAS Viya

SAS Viya is an AI, analytic and data management platform that runs on a modern, scalable architecture. It is cloud-first software, designed to be delivered and updated continuously and bring the power of analytics to everyone, everywhere. SAS Viya integrates the art of decision making with the science of AI and advanced analytics, helping organizations to make better decisions, faster.