When it comes to presenting at events like SAS Innovate on Tour, it’s never just a one-way street.
No matter how many countries I visit, how many times I click through my slides, or how often I speak to a room full of people who love technology, I always learn just as much from the audience as I hope they learn from me.
At this year’s Innovate on Tour, my keynote was about how generative AI (GenAI) – as well as some of SAS's newer technologies – helps you be more productive. This has obviously been a big year for AI, and speaking to audiences gave me an opportunity to tell customers (and potential customers) what SAS has been up to in that space.
One of my favorite things, though, is when keynotes turn into conversations. So, on that note, here are a few insights that I shared with audiences all over the world – and a few that I brought back with me.
Here's three things I shared with audiences:
1. SAS is not just talking about what’s possible with GenAI. We’re doing.
While some organizations talk about how they plan to implement GenAI one day, SAS has several offerings currently using it.
But.
GenAI won’t solve all our problems. In fact, it can cause them too. Which leads me to the next thing I shared…
2. GenAI gives us more of everything. But sometimes more becomes too much.
GenAI makes you highly efficient, giving you more of everything: more questions, more data, more code, more models, more answers. But the downside is that more can get out of hand unless you have the right processes, tools or governance in place.
Think of it like an assembly line. You start with data and then wrangle it with code. Once your data is ready you build models, then you deploy those models into the enterprise – which hopefully results in answers or decisions.
But when the rate of production increases due to using GenAI, everything else also increases. Without the right tools to handle the extra productivity, things pile up, work gets delayed and opportunities are missed – because there’s nothing to help manage the chaos.
Of course, this is where SAS® Viya® comes in. Viya helps you manage data, build models and gain insights from those models. It absorbs your surplus productivity and manages it more.
3. Not only does SAS Viya manage the more – so do other new SAS technologies.
This is the fun part because we have a deep bench of products that use GenAI to help you be more productive. Take SAS® Data Maker, which covers the first part of our assembly line by generating synthetic data that’s statistically congruent with real data in a low-code, no-code environment. Or SAS Viya Workbench, our cloud-native, cloud-scalable development environment that enables you to spin up a development environment in seconds. And then there’s SAS App Factory and SAS Viya Copilot. All of them help manage the more.
I also learned quite a bit, too. Here's three things the tour taught me:
1. When it comes to AI, some people have discovered that it can overpromise – and underdeliver.
Let’s chalk this one up to hype versus reality. Despite a (valid) sense of AI excitement, some people aren’t yet seeing the ROIs they’d hoped for. They’ve got a lot of demos and proof-of-concepts (PoCs) going, but not a lot of actual things deployed in their enterprise that deliver real business value.
This sentiment came up a few times during our travels. Here’s my takeaway: When we’re talking about AI, whether on stage or in personal conversations, it’s important to keep expectations in check and stay focused on delivering actual business value.
2. The best communication happens in person (or, to put it another way: relationships matter).
As part of my role in R&D I try to prioritize good communication, whether that means scheduling an impromptu Teams chat or sending out regular newsletters. But even a great Microsoft Teams chat can’t compare to an actual face-to-face, pull-up-a-chair, nice-to-see-you conversation. It’s easy to forget this when we get busy in our routines, but I’m always (pleasantly) reminded when I do events like Innovate on Tour. It’s an opportunity to not just talk but to learn.
3. Traveling to multiple countries is exhausting, but full of the most unexpected surprises.
This one’s tough to articulate, so let me try to set the stage. Participating in Innovate on Tour entails long hours, crazy jet lag, and the challenge of keeping up with work while adjusting to new time zones. But just as the exhaustion sets in, something happens that reminds me of how grateful I am to have these experiences.
Like, for example, seeing our support team at work solving every problem that cropped up. Or attending a networking event where balloons helped us track the whereabouts of our executives (you have to see it to believe it). Or getting a small dose of different cultures that helps me better understand the daily lives of our global teams. It’s safe to say that I come home exhausted, but exhilarated. Proud of our team, proud of our products, proud of SAS. (But ready to get back to my own office.)
