How to transform data and AI teams for greater productivity

Everyone has heard it: Your organization needs to be more productive. But how? Businesses are constantly challenged with adopting AI technology, managing rising costs and closing talent gaps.

While AI can boost performance, the need for faster, more performant models is often stymied by inefficient handoffs between key roles within the data and AI life cycle.

Informed business decisions depend on a fluid process for managing data, developing models and ensuring successful deployment and monitoring.

The research is in

Recent studies commissioned with The Futurum Group reveal significant benefits for data and AI teams using SAS^® Viya^®. The results highlighted a 30 times increase in performance and over 4 times improvement in productivity compared to other platforms. This blend of speed and productivity is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in today's fast-paced landscape.

Why it matters

The latest productivity study shows that Viya delivers over 4 times improvement compared to a commercial platform and a non-commercial open source-based solution. This means that data and AI teams can achieve much more in less time, significantly enhancing operational efficiency.

Imagine the impact. With Viya, a team of 500 data and AI professionals can work as effectively as a team of 2,000, leading to enhanced output capabilities. This translates to the ability to focus on revenue growth, launch new products rapidly, respond to market changes with agility, drive customer innovation, and even reduce costs by achieving the same work with fewer team members.

In today's dynamic business environment, where challenges like inflation, supply chain disruptions and evolving workforce dynamics are prevalent, productivity plays a vital role. Teams that can iterate through the data and AI life cycle over 4 times faster can concentrate on strategic initiatives, innovate rapidly, respond to market changes with agility, and create customer-centric solutions efficiently.

The efficiency of data and AI teams directly impacts the bottom line, resulting in a greater return on investment. Viya's productivity enhancements pave the way for enhanced performance, innovation and value creation in organizations.

What are the results?

The data and AI life cycle activities were broken down by the roles of a data engineer, data scientist and ML Ops engineer, with 30 specific tasks analyzed across the data and AI life cycle. In addition, a fourth business analyst role, typically someone who has a blend of non-technical and technical skills, was also analyzed to understand the ease of use and learning curve needed. Here’s what was found:

Data engineer: 16 times more productive

Data engineers completed their tasks in 18 minutes in Viya versus 5 hours in both the non-commercial and commercial platforms.
For data engineers, Viya enabled a staggering 16-fold increase in productivity.

This dramatic boost allows data engineers to focus more on strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down in repetitive data handling and integration tasks.

Data scientist: 3.5 times more productive

Data scientists completed their tasks in 3 hours on Viya compared to 12 hours on the non-commercial platform and 9 hours on the commercial platform, which is a 3.5-times productivity increase when using Viya.

This enhancement enables data scientists to spend more time on model development and experimentation, fostering innovation and improving the quality of insights generated.

MLOps engineer: 4.5 times more productive

MLOps engineers completed their tasks in 40 minutes in Viya versus 3 hours in both the non-commercial and commercial platforms, which is a 4.5 times increase in productivity.

This productivity boost supports more efficient model deployment and monitoring, ensuring that models can be scaled and maintained effectively, which is critical for sustained operational success.

Viya offers significant advantages in terms of speed and productivity across all key roles involved in the data and AI life cycle, driving better business outcomes.

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