As AI adoption in marketing accelerates, SAS has announced the expansion of agentic AI capabilities within SAS Customer Intelligence 360. This update introduces a generation of specialized AI agents designed to collaborate with marketers, operating within defined guardrails to improve outcomes across audiences, journeys, and execution. By prioritizing transparency and human oversight, SAS aims to transform its platform into an intelligent operating system that amplifies human expertise rather than replacing it.
SAS introduces specialized AI agents to collaborate with marketers under human oversight.
The system uses a multi-agent architecture rather than a single, monolithic AI model.
The SAS 360 Agent acts as a supervisory layer to coordinate specialized sub-agents.
The Journeys Agent automates campaign structure creation from text, images, or prompts.
The Search Agent allows natural language queries for operational and performance data.
AI agents generate production-ready SAS code to ensure immediate, accurate deployment.
SAS has developed a multi-agent system where each agent is specialized and context-aware. These agents do not replace existing capabilities like audiences or destinations; instead, they operate across them to retrieve objects and make recommendations. This approach allows marketers to move away from resource-constrained, linear models toward a system that supports granular decisions and campaigns at scale.
The SAS 360 Agent serves as the primary coordination layer. It manages interactions between specialized agents—including Audience, Journey, Email, and Search agents—to orchestrate actions across customer data and journey execution. This enables a collaborative partnership where the AI handles complex retrieval and assembly while the marketer maintains control.
The Journeys Agent is designed to move marketing concepts from idea to execution rapidly. By using multi-modal inputs like text briefs or conversational prompts, the agent assembles journey structures aligned with best practices. Throughout the process, human-in-the-loop checkpoints ensure the marketer approves the structure before the agent generates the consistent SAS code required for production.
"The Journey Agent has strong potential to streamline campaign creation and improve efficiency at scale, particularly when managing complex, multi-market campaigns," said Eleonora Parlatore, Head of Creative Services and Operations at Global Blue.
Complementing this is the Search Agent, which reduces friction by allowing users to ask natural language questions about performance and operational tasks. Instead of manually navigating dashboards, marketers receive contextual answers grounded in their specific data environment, significantly improving platform usability.
SAS emphasizes that its agentic AI is built on principles of trust and explainability. By embedding AI directly into existing workflows rather than adding it as a standalone feature, SAS ensures that governance remains a first principle.
"Agentic AI isn't about handing control to machines," said Mike Blanchard, Vice President, Customer Intelligence at SAS. "It's about creating systems that amplify human expertise, one specialized agent at a time."
The expansion reflects SAS’s long-term commitment to responsible deployment, ensuring that as AI systems accelerate, they remain controllable and transparent for enterprise users.
This announcement, made at the SAS Innovate conference, marks a significant milestone in the company's 50-year history of data and AI innovation, supported by partners including Microsoft, Intel, and AWS.
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