Inside SAS Innovate: The Shift to Production-Ready AI

From SAS Innovate, continuing conversations with leaders shaping how enterprise AI actually gets deployed. I spoke to Marinela Profi from SAS and this one cut straight to where the industry really is right now.There’s a lot of excitement around AI. But most enterprises are still not ready to scale it. We talked about why. The gap is no longer about models. It’s about systems, governance, and how AI fits into real enterprise workflows.One of the most interesting parts of the discussion was around MCP (Model Context Protocol) inside SAS Viya. This is about giving AI systems the right context, control, and structure so they can operate reliably in production environments.Because without that, AI stays stuck in experimentation. We also went deep into why SAS is building dedicated agent infrastructure instead of just layering AI on top of existing tools. That decision matters.It allows enterprises to move faster, while still maintaining control, auditability, and trust. That balance is what most organizations are struggling with today.My biggest takeaway. The industry is moving from generative AI experimentsTo governed, production-ready intelligence. And that shift requires a completely different approach to architecture.#data #ai #SASInnovate #SASVisionary #theravitshow