SAS has expanded the agentic AI capabilities within SAS Customer Intelligence 360, introducing a set of specialised AI agents designed to work alongside marketers rather than replace them.

The new agents are built to collaborate with users, operate within defined guardrails and deliver value across audiences, journeys, decisioning and execution, while maintaining transparency, governance and human oversight throughout.

A multi-agent system built around human oversight

Rather than a single monolithic AI, SAS has built a multi-agent system in which each agent is specialised, context-aware and designed to act on behalf of the marketer while remaining transparent and controllable. The agents do not replace existing capabilities such as audiences, journeys, destinations or marketing decisioning — instead, they operate across them to retrieve relevant objects, make recommendations and accelerate execution under human supervision.

The SAS 360 Agent acts as a supervisory layer, coordinating specialised agents including Audience, Journey, Email, Search and Recipes agents, so marketers can direct actions across customer data, marketing AI and journey execution without navigating multiple tools and interfaces.

“Agentic AI isn’t about handing control to machines. It’s about creating systems that amplify human expertise, one specialised agent at a time,” said Mike Blanchard, Vice President, Customer Intelligence at SAS.

From campaign planning to faster answers

The Journeys Agent helps marketers build customer journeys from multi-modal inputs, including text briefs, images and conversational prompts, retrieving relevant audiences, events and touchpoints and assembling a journey structure aligned to best practices and marketer intent. Human-in-the-loop checkpoints run throughout planning and creation, while the agent generates production-ready SAS code behind the scenes.

“The Journey Agent has strong potential to streamline campaign creation and improve efficiency at scale, particularly when managing complex, multi-market campaigns,” said Eleonora Parlatore, Head of Creative Services and Operations at Global Blue.

The Search Agent lets marketers ask operational and performance-related questions across the Customer Intelligence 360 environment — starting with tasks and audiences and expanding to further areas over time — returning contextual answers grounded in their own data instead of requiring dashboard navigation.

The announcement was made at SAS Innovate, the company’s global data and AI conference, as SAS marks 50 years of operation. This year’s event is supported by partner sponsors including Microsoft, Intel and AWS.