Interview: SAS harnesses generative AI to provide industry solutions

SAS’s Celal Kavuklu, head of Pre-sales, META speaks to Gulf Business about delivering the last mile of generative AI’s promise for its clients, creating guardrails in the development of this technology, and helping close the skills gap.

Q. What did you showcase at GITEX GLOBAL 2023?

We’re here because our customers are here, particularly government organiSations exploring AI’s potential in addressing their challenges. With 47 years of industry experience, we aim to be their best partner. Our focus is on AI platforms, especially in the UAE and Saudi, catering to various sectors like FSI and government entities. Each sector has distinct AI needs, from healthcare to public security, and we’re here to support them with our accumulated use cases.

At GITEX, we showcased SAS Viya, an end-to-end analytics and decisioning platform, forming the basis for our solutions. It simplifies the understanding of our SAS solutions and products, allowing us to address a wide range of industry problems effectively. The new product creates a lightweight environment for rapidly building AI models and applications, support multiple programming languages and provide immediate access to scalable cloud computing.

Q. How can governments and enterprises use data analytics to make informed decisions?

Data analytics finds applications in various areas, but some key ones include fraud and financial crimes, risk management, and marketing. We’re market leaders in fraud detection and prevention. Our AI-powered risk management solutions address market risks and liquidity risks. Additionally, we provide solutions for hyper-personalisation and integrated marketing.

Q. How is SaS addressing the concerns around generative AI for its clients?

We have seen a lot of enthusiasm for AI, and we understand that this brings forward mutiple concerns connected to AI initiatives. SAS addresses this by optimising cloud computation and hardware costs. We can create synthetic data for clients with private, secure data, reducing overall costs which limits visibility, and ensures data privacy. For synthetic data generation, SAS is working with customers in the banking and health care industries. SAS’ innovation in this space massively improves predictive models while reducing cost to insight across industries like health care, life sciences, banking, insurance, retail and manufacturing.

SAS is also extensively researching the application of large language models (LLMs) to industry problems with a primary focus on delivering trusted and secure results to customers.

Our partnerships with Intel and Microsoft further contribute to cost reduction, showing that technology can address concerns as AI initiatives evolve.

Q. How do you foresee the impact of AI in the next five years?

The impact of AI will be significant, especially in government entities with clear transformation strategies.

Governments with large populations like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are keen on applying AI-driven decisions at a national scale, creating immediate returns on investment. We’ll witness AI applications in healthcare, defense, and public security initiatives, making a substantial impact.

Q. What challenges do you see in the adoption of AI, and how are you addressing these challenges?

The biggest challenge is the talent gap—finding individuals capable of understanding and applying AI to business challenges. SAS is addressing this through its institute, partnering with universities, and offering educational programs on data science.

We’re also supporting organisations by continuously educating their staff, considering the high turnover rate in data science skills.