As enterprises accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence into business operations, many continue to face challenges linked to fragmented data systems, manual data preparation processes and governance structures that are not designed for AI-driven environments.
In response, SAS has introduced a major update to its SAS Data Management portfolio, a cloud-native solution built on the SAS Viya data and AI platform. The enhanced platform is designed to help organizations prepare, govern and activate data more effectively for analytics, automation and AI applications.
The company said the update is aimed at helping enterprises scale AI initiatives more efficiently by embedding governance, lineage tracking and performance optimization directly into data workflows.
The refreshed platform includes several new and expanded capabilities, including AI-ready data management tools, integrated governance features, support for agentic AI and copilots, and cloud-native analytics acceleration.
SAS noted that weak data centralization and inadequate governance practices remain key barriers to AI adoption. Research conducted by IDC and SAS found that nearly half of organizations surveyed identified poorly optimized cloud data environments as the leading obstacle to AI progress, while 44% cited insufficient governance frameworks.
Industry forecasts also indicate that a large percentage of AI initiatives risk failure because organizations lack AI-ready data infrastructures.
To address these concerns, SAS Data Management integrates governance and auditability directly into the data lifecycle, allowing organizations to improve transparency, operational control and trust across analytics and AI systems.
One of the central components of the updated platform is SAS SpeedyStore, a high-performance cloud-native analytical data platform integrated with SAS Viya. The platform enables analytics and AI workloads to operate closer to where data resides, reducing the need for data movement while lowering latency, costs and governance risks.
SAS has also expanded interoperability with external cloud data platforms through SAS Data Accelerator, enabling analytics workloads to run directly within major cloud data warehouses and lakehouse environments without requiring data duplication.
In addition, the company unveiled new AI-driven assistants designed to simplify data discovery, code development and synthetic data generation.
SAS Viya Copilot for Data Discovery allows users to explore governed data assets using natural language queries, helping organizations locate and validate data sources more efficiently.
Another feature, SAS Viya Copilot for Code Assistance, supports developers by generating and refining SAS and Python code through natural language prompts within SAS Studio.
SAS also introduced SAS Data Maker, a synthetic data generation solution that creates realistic datasets while preserving privacy, auditability and regulatory compliance.
The announcement was made during SAS Innovate, the company’s global data and AI conference, as SAS celebrates its 50th anniversary. The event is supported by partners including Microsoft, Intel and AWS.
