GRAPEVINE, Texas — SAS, the 50-year-old analytics powerhouse, is telling Fortune 500 customers to stop chasing artificial intelligence and start solving real-world problems. At its annual Innovate 2026 conference, executives repeatedly described AI as nothing more than "a tool" — an accessory to the company's decades-long focus on domain-specific questions.
"To us, it's just a tool," said Udo Sglavo, SAS's vice president of applied AI and modeling, in an interview. "It was not about creating the technology. It was really about, 'Can we solve a specific business question, industry question?'"
The message builds on a keynote by SAS CTO Bryan Harris, who placed AI on the same arc as the internet — transformative, but destined to fade into the background. "Every breakthrough technology follows the same arc: it solves a problem, it reshapes society, and eventually it fades into the background of everyday life," Harris told attendees in Grapevine, Texas. "Yesterday it was the internet, and today it’s AI. And tomorrow, I can assure you it will be something else."
Background
Founded in the 1970s by researchers analyzing agricultural data at North Carolina State University, SAS has long prioritized domain expertise over tech novelty. The company's earliest success — a programming language that turned raw data into decisions — set a pattern of neutrality that continues today. In the 1980s, SAS pioneered a "multi-vendor architecture" that let its software run on mainframes, Unix, and PCs. When cloud computing arrived, it took the same approach across AWS, Google Cloud, and on-premises environments.
When large language models exploded onto the scene, SAS considered building its own but quickly decided against it. "AI will change again. We will see different waves of different AI techniques coming in," Sglavo said. "And we will always say, 'Look, it doesn't matter to us.'" Instead, SAS maintains an "agnostic technology" stance, integrating whichever LLMs its customers already use — even if that means plugging into Microsoft's ecosystem for a German insurance company that is a Microsoft shop.
"When we go to a German insurance company, and they are a Microsoft shop, we can't come in and say, 'We want you to use this large language model,'" Sglavo explained. "They already have their own."
What This Means
SAS's message is a direct counterpoint to the AI arms race consuming much of the tech industry. By framing AI as a feature — not a product — the company hopes to retain its legacy of solving complex problems in finance, healthcare, and manufacturing without being tied to any single underlying model. The approach also hedges against the rapid obsolescence of LLMs, allowing SAS to swap in new techniques as they emerge.
At Innovate 2026, the company demonstrated agentic workflows, digital twins built with Unreal Engine, and quantum computing efforts — each powered by AI but marketed as practical tools for specific outcomes. Harris closed his keynote by reminding the audience: "The only thing that outlasts every innovation is people." For SAS, that means the technology itself is always secondary to the problem it solves.