GenAI allows us to reimagine human experience: SAS's Bryan Harris

SAS, the US-based analytics company, is making major investments in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and its India team will play a significant role in this work. SAS has 950 employees in India, including teams for research and development (R&D) and sales and marketing. BRYAN HARRIS, executive vice-president and chief technology officer of SAS, conversed with Ayushman Baruah about the company’s plans. Edited excerpts from an interview over email.

SAS announced in May that it will invest an additional $1 billion in industry applications, including GenAI capabilities. Which areas would this investment go into?

SAS is committing $1 billion to AI-powered industry solutions over the next three years. As outlined in the May 2023 announcement, the investment in AI builds on SAS’s decades-long focus on providing tailored solutions to industry challenges in banking, government, insurance, health care, retail, manufacturing, energy, telecom/media and more.

The 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. As part of this investment in industry solutions, SAS will deliver the last mile of generative AI’s promise and include the integration of trustworthy generative AI capabilities that are accurate, explainable and defendable. SAS’s previous billion-dollar investment in AI was in 2019. The most important result of that investment was SAS Viya, our cloud-native, cloud-portable and massively parallel AI and analytics platform. All industry solutions developed under the $1 billion investment announced in May 2023 will run on SAS Viya.

How much of the billion dollar investment will be for India operations?

All SAS R&D teams will support the commitment to develop industry-specific AI and analytics solutions. These include teams at SAS headquarters in Cary, North Carolina; developers in Pune, India, which is our largest R&D centre outside the US; and those at other sites around the globe. A significant portion of developers in Pune already work on our industry solutions. Given our billion-dollar investment, we clearly see the Pune R&D centre as a growth area for the business.

How is SAS integrating GenAI into its solutions?

There is no question that generative AI is allowing us to reimagine the human experience with software and data. When you reduce the human experience with AI to a conversation, you have removed all barriers to adoption. This is the moment we are in right now. And this is why every one of us in the technology space is so excited. Realising value from generative AI requires deep industry domain expertise, state-of-the-art AI capabilities and end-to-end governance. SAS uniquely delivers all of this in our portfolio. As a software company, we think about delivering capabilities for two user groups: Builders of AI and consumers of AI.

For builders, we will create conversational experiences with the entire AI and analytics lifecycle. For consumers, we will create conversational experiences with their industry data and workflows, which will significantly improve productivity within their businesses.

Any specific areas of GenAI that SAS is focusing on?

Specifically, SAS is focusing on three areas under the generative AI umbrella in which we have both experience and success: Synthetic data generation, digital twins, and large language models (LLMs). We continue to work with customers building digital twin simulations in manufacturing and logistics. For synthetic data generation, SAS is working with customers in the banking and health care industries. SAS is also extensively researching the fine-tuning and orchestration of foundational LLMs with customer data to solve industry problems. As we continue building on these areas with our customers, we anticipate extending our reach into additional areas of generative AI on our own and with a variety of partners. We are already testing the integration of a chatbot into SAS Viya, our AI and analytics platform. It will allow our customers to use natural language to interact with our tools and their own data. This integration will help our customers realise value from generative AI more quickly.

What is SAS's plan to tap key customers in India?

Over the past 25 years, we have had the privilege of working with many top banks, insurers, manufacturers, telecom companies, energy and utility organisations as well as government departments in India. Specifically, we are helping banks and insurers manage risk, fight fraud, improve customer experiences and comply with the latest regulations. Increasingly, we are also working with companies in health care and life sciences industries to ensure production quality and develop new therapies faster. We are also helping manufacturers and energy companies forecast demand. We are proud to support large government initiatives such as Ayushman Bharat to empower governments to make informed decisions and take actions to protect and improve the lives of the people they serve. We have also doubled down on our partner strategy to drive growth, enable innovation and empower customers.