SAS Expands Viya with New AI Assistants and Agent Infrastructure

SAS has introduced new AI assistants and agentic AI tools for its SAS Viya platform, announced in a press release. The updates include the SAS Viya Copilot, Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, and Agentic AI Accelerator, designed to help organizations move from isolated generative AI projects to governed, production-scale intelligence.

SAS Viya Copilot is a conversational AI assistant embedded across the analytics life cycle. It supports natural language interaction for data analysis, model building, and decision-making within the Viya environment. Current capabilities include code generation, model pipeline guidance, and visual analysis. Industry-specific copilots are already available for financial risk and clinical data discovery, with more planned for 2026.

The SAS Viya MCP Server uses the open MCP standard to make Viya analytics and decisioning tools available to external AI agents. This allows organizations to integrate SAS analytics within their own AI systems while maintaining governance. The SAS Agentic AI Accelerator offers a curated framework to help teams design and deploy AI agents using no-code, low-code, or developer tools.

SAS also introduced the Retrieval Agent Manager, a no-code retrieval augmented generation solution that converts unstructured data into context-aware AI responses. It will be integrated into Viya in the future to expand grounding capabilities for AI assistants and agents.