SAS adds agentic AI tools to Customer Intelligence 360

SAS has expanded the agentic AI functions in SAS Customer Intelligence 360, adding specialised agents for marketing tasks.

The update is intended to preserve human oversight as marketers use more AI across campaigns, audiences and customer journeys.

Rather than relying on a single general-purpose tool, the system uses multiple agents, each designed for a specific role. They can work across Customer Intelligence 360 functions including audiences, journeys, destinations and marketing decisioning.

The agents are designed to retrieve relevant objects, make recommendations and support execution while marketers remain in control. SAS said the aim is to embed AI into existing marketing workflows rather than bolt separate features onto the platform.

Multi-agent setup

At the centre of the approach is the SAS 360 Agent, which acts as a supervisory layer for the other agents in the system. It manages interactions between specialised tools including the Audience, Journey, Email, Search and Recipes agents.

The goal is to reduce the need for marketers to move between different interfaces when working with customer data, marketing AI and journey execution. By placing a coordinating layer above the specialised tools, SAS is aiming to make the platform easier to use for day-to-day campaign work.

One of the newly highlighted tools is the Journeys Agent. It helps marketers create customer journeys from text briefs, images and conversational prompts, then pulls together audiences, events and touchpoints to assemble a journey structure.

Checkpoints are built into the process so users can review and guide what the system produces. The agent also generates SAS code in the background, allowing journeys to move into deployment with less manual build work.

Eleonora Parlatore, Head of Creative Services and Operations at Global Blue, commented on the Journeys Agent.

"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, Global Blue. "We see clear opportunities for it to enhance automation and simplify workflows as it continues to evolve."

Search focus

SAS also outlined a Search Agent that lets marketers ask operational and performance questions across the Customer Intelligence 360 environment. The tool starts with tasks and audiences and is expected to expand into other parts of the system.

Instead of searching through dashboards and menus, users can put questions directly to the agent and receive answers based on their own data. SAS presents this as a way to reduce friction when finding campaign or audience information inside the platform.

The expansion reflects a wider push by software vendors to position AI as a co-pilot for business users while also emphasising limits on autonomy. In marketing technology, that balance has become more important as companies try to automate planning, segmentation, content execution and measurement without losing governance or auditability.

SAS said its approach is based on what it describes as trustworthy AI principles, with human-in-the-loop control and transparency built into the product. The company is presenting that structure as a response to concerns about how much freedom AI systems should have in customer-facing work.

For marketing teams, the practical question is whether these systems can reduce the manual effort involved in building and managing campaigns. Customer journey design, audience selection and operational reporting are often spread across multiple tools and teams, slowing execution even where automation already exists.

By linking agents to existing functions inside Customer Intelligence 360, SAS is positioning AI as an orchestration layer rather than a replacement for the underlying product. That distinction matters because many large marketing teams already have established approval processes and compliance checks that limit how far any autonomous system can act on its own.

Mike Blanchard, Vice President, Customer Intelligence, SAS, set out the company's position on that point.

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