SAS unveils industry AI models as part of USD $1 billion push

SAS has released a new suite of artificial intelligence models designed to address various business process challenges across different industries.

The new models form part of SAS's ongoing USD $1 billion investment in industry-focused solutions and are tailored to tackle labour-intensive and time-consuming tasks which are often a source of inefficiency for businesses.

The portfolio includes models that are either fully ready for immediate use or designed to be quickly adapted to an organisation's own data, with the ability to integrate seamlessly into existing systems regardless of the company's size.

SAS states that development of these models has been steered by its Data Ethics Practice guidelines. Supporting documentation provided by the company is intended to ensure customers can build, explain, and deploy models that deliver understandable and accountable results.

The specific models now available include Cross-Industry AI-Driven Entity Resolution and Document Analysis, Healthcare Medication Adherence Risk, Manufacturing Strategic Supply Chain Optimization, and Public Sector Payment Integrity for Food Assistance as well as Tax Compliance for Sales Tax.

Kathy Lange, Research Director at IDC, said: "SAS Models are based on SAS' core assets, talent and intellectual property from its wealth of experience working with customers to solve industry problems. Between their scalability and seamless integration with existing environments, SAS Models are a great option for those looking to accelerate time to production who might lack the expertise or time to build models from scratch."

SAS has indicated that its suite of industry-specific models will be expanded over the course of 2025 to address further business needs, responding to customer and market demand.

Future additions to the product lineup will cover banking with Fraud Decisioning for Payments and Card Models, healthcare with Payment Integrity for HealthCare, manufacturing with Worker Safety Monitoring, and the public sector with Tax Compliance for Individual Income Tax.

The company has also provided insight into its strategy to boost autonomy within its solutions, previewing the development of agentic counterparts to its current models. These agentic offerings are positioned to increase automation in operations tailored for specific sectors.

The automation of data preparation is an additional area SAS intends to improve. Building and optimising data lakes—large repositories for raw customer data to be structured for use in models—can be a lengthy process for data scientists. SAS's forthcoming AI agent is described as a pre-built solution that will automatically manage complex data preparation, allowing models to function in real time without any manual restructuring.

Udo Sglavo, Vice President of Applied AI and Modelling, R&D at SAS, commented: "We believe the future of AI lies in agents that are not only intelligent but also responsible, ready-to-use and relevant. Our new industry-specific models, built on decades of domain expertise and guided by our ethics-first approach, represent a bold step toward agentic AI: solutions that think with context, act with purpose and deliver real-world impact."