Data analytics company SAS said on April 29 local time it added a raft of new functions to its SAS data and AI platform Viya at the SAS Innovate event.

It highlighted 3 main areas. The focus is on minimizing data movement to boost analysis speed and security, accelerating code generation and strengthening integration with external AI agents.

According to a Techzine report, SAS SpeedyStore stands out on the data management front. SpeedyStore supports running analytics and AI workloads directly where data resides, without moving it elsewhere. SAS said this can cut costs and latency and preserve data histories needed for compliance.

SAS Data Accelerator supports running SAS analytics directly in third-party cloud environments such as data warehouses and lakehouses. SAS said it includes DuckDB to quickly analyze file formats including Parquet, CSV and JSON.

On developer support, SAS said it integrated SAS Viya Copilot and Microsoft Foundry so users can write and edit SAS and Python code by voice or text without a separate chat interface.

It also unveiled an ALM Copilot for financial risk management and a Health Clinical Data Discovery Copilot for analysis of healthcare clinical data.

SAS also introduced 2 new components for a shift to agent AI. The SAS Viya Model Context Protocol Server supports directly using SAS analytics capabilities through external LLM interfaces such as Anthropic Claude under the MCP standard.

SAS Agentic AI Accelerator provides a framework for designing and managing agents and deploying them into operations, from no-code business users to professional developers. Alyssa Farrell (알리사 패럴), senior director for data and AI strategy at SAS, said it helps realize AI value by embedding governance and trust directly into the data foundation.