SAS Institute Inc. is continuing to capitalize on an era of artificial intelligence and machine learning with Viya Workbench, a platform that empowers business users of all backgrounds with its data science and automation software.

“Most of our customers, they don’t necessarily wake up every day wanting to be a professional software development organization. They’re in financial services or health and life sciences or manufacturing. So … we have to take that on,” said Jared Peterson (pictured), senior vice president of engineering at SAS. “We’ve got to bring the professional software development, software engineering architecture and those kinds of things to bear.”

Peterson spoke with theCUBE Research’s executive analyst John Furrier and chief analyst Dave Vellante at SAS Innovate, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how AI is changing the role of developers and business users, and what is next for SAS’ cloud services. (* Disclosure below.)

How Viya Workbench levels up its users

Viya Workbench is a cloud-native, cloud-scalable development environment that gives users access to integrated development environments, SAS code and open-source code software in one place. Its speedy start up and wide array of tools allow users to easily test and run AI models, according to Peterson.

“In Workbench, we’ve taken all of these analytical investments we’ve made in the last few years in Viya … things like advanced computer vision algorithms, advanced natural language processing, neural networks,” he said. “All that capability that’s been in Viya is now in the SAS language.”

Generative AI tools could allow developers without a background in data science or business users from different fields to level up.

“Generative AI coming into tools like Workbench, whether it’s through co-pilots and code assistants and those things, is going to enable people maybe coming from more of just a developer background to then dabble in data science,” Peterson said. 

Although Workbench will definitely give developers a new environment to play in, the impact of AI and automated tools is too large to comprehend yet, Peterson added.

“In the future, we will be competing with companies we don’t even know exist today, because these tools enable this wave of productivity that we’ve just never seen and never imagined,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of SAS Innovate:

(* Disclosure: SAS Institute Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither SAS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE